Film review: Singham Returns

Singham Returns is typically a Rohit Shetty film - vacuous, cliched and action-filled

Whether you like it or not, Rohit Shetty's brand of cinema - when a man churns out blockbusters with every release then it does become a brand - clearly has a lot of takers. Flying cars, over-the-top action, a hero who single-handedly beats the bad guys into pulp, all are a staple of Shetty's world. And the director is back to torment or entertain - depending on which side you are on - with Singham Returns, which is a quintessential Shetty film.

As in the 2011 film Singham, the Great Maratha Warrior Bajirao Singham (Ajay Devgn) is a supercop whose mission this time is to unearth the black money racket prevalent during elections. His adversaries in this sequel are a godman (Amol Gupte) and an evil politician (Zakir Hussain), both of them cliched to the core. The godman, or Baba, is lecherous and wicked, while the politician talks about coalition politics and incites communal riots. There is Guruji (Anupam Kher), based loosely on Anna Hazare, who forms a new party where youngsters will be given a chance.

The plot is extremely weak, predictable and barely manages to hold your interest. But this is the world of Shetty and here the fundamentals of cinema - like a good script or a story - genuinely don't matter much. What matters is the hero, the epitome of machismo who mouths lines like "Sher aatank machata hai, ghayal sher tabahi" (loose translation: a lion is all about fear whereas a wounded lion is all about destruction). We have bad guys who say things like "politics mein sahi aur galat ka koi barometer nahin hota (in politics there's no barometer of right and wrong)".

Shetty plays to the gallery and actually takes you through a time warp because Singham Returns is a throwback to the terrible action films of the late 1980s and '90s. Back then Dharmendra - a criminally wasted actor - used to be the macho man who beat the hell out of every bad guy on the street. Here it's Devgn who does that. Shetty's strengths have always been the action sequences and he doesn't disappoint his fans. There are fewer cars that are flying around - perhaps six or seven - and there's a shootout sequence which is actually shot quite well.

Kareena Kapoor Khan plays Singham's love interest and is frankly quite over the top and tries too hard to provide comic relief. She is wasted in the film and at one point calls a guy "Made in China" just because he is from the North-East and is selling chowmein.

But in Shetty's cosmos, the audience laughs at this kind of humour, and applauds heartily when the hero jumps out of a moving car and starts shooting people. Clearly, the director knows his audience and gives them the fare they are seeking on the same old platter. The jarring background score is a mixture of loud cymbals and "Singham, Singham" chants and there's heavy usage of Marathi in the film.

Singham Returns is very likely to give you a severe headache for two obvious reasons: a) it's a very silly action film and b) because you will puzzle over how Shetty's films have such glorious runs at the box-office. Credit to him though for cracking the code and making these huge money-spinners. As for the audience - unless you subscribe to Shetty's sensibilities - they go into the auditorium expecting a silly, extravagant, pointless, action flick and that's exactly what you get with Singham Returns.