Review of Singham Again: Ranveer Singh is by far the movie’s most brilliant element. He is, for the most part, funny with his incessant chatter.
Singham? No, not once more. Yes, that is really frustrating. Singham Again, Rohit Shetty’s latest addition to his Cop Universe is bloated, overheated, and disorganised, unless you are a die-hard fan of the vacuous and persistent bombast that these potboilers are based on.
There is still enough volume in Singham’s roar. The loud background music prevents the noise level from dropping even a single decibel. However, the impact is diminishing and begging for a radical reinvention, regardless of how shrill and insistent the action gets.
The police action thriller is left gasping for air—and true inspiration—by the sloppy, lowest common denominator filmmaking that Singham Again uses. To draw parallels to the current events, the movie interjects mythological scenes,which are connected by a narrator. The attempt to establish a link between myth and reality is too flimsy.
The Ramayan, the go-to repository of ideas and characters in Hindi cinema, is the most practical option when the tank is as dangerously leaky as this and the game depends on tricks that are long past their expiration dates. However, not even the Lord can save Singham once more. The film’s quiver contains blunt arrows. Big time.
Bajirao Singham, played by Ajay Devgn, returns in Singham Again to fight a cross-border war against terrorist Danger Lanka, also known as Zubair Hafeez (Arjun Kapoor), ten years after he took on the evil empire of a phoney godman in Singham Returns.
The evil man isn’t waging a religious war. Instead, he is on a personal quest to free his grandfather, Omar Hafeez (Jackie Shroff), from a high-security Indian prison and exact revenge on his father and uncles. He chooses to use Avni (Kareena Kapoor Khan), Singham’s wife, as leverage.
The fact that the woman is a culture ministry official and a woman of substance who creates and performs a modern-day Ram Leela is another issue. She should be able to give as well as she receives, right? But no, that would negate the movie’s main goal. She is therefore portrayed as helpless and exposed.
The action hero, dressed in the stale attire of a saviour-crusader, sets out to right the wrongs committed by a vengeful villain who is initially mistaken for a simple drug lord in this Ram-Sita-Ravana redux. After a massacre and a kidnapping, Singham comes to the realisation that he is up against a ruthless psychopath.
Finding a needle in a haystack might be easier for the maximalist cop drama than coming up with a novel plot. Not only is it not a particularly good idea or a particularly effective plot device to incorporate Ramayan references into a clumsy good versus-evil framework, but it is also tainted by a stubbornly cliched approach to well-known tropes.
Since the screenplay, which was written by six writers (including director Rohit Shetty), lacks originality, Singham Again relies on a phalanx of lawmen and a lawwoman (Deepika Padukone), who makes a promising debut in a world dominated by men, but is not given any opportunity to outshine her male co-actors for support.
When Devgn slipped into the ballistic franchise-defining “aata majhi satakli” mode in 2011’s Singham, the lead actor was nearly a decade and a half younger. His spectacular displays of bravery and daring were in line with director Shetty’s vision of an unbeatable police officer who was so devoted to his work that he was fearless.
Even though the brave police officer is now older and serves as an example for both juniors and peers, he still has Jeeps, off-road vehicles, and burning buildings all around him. This is a defining feature of the directing style, which has been maintained with differing degrees of success in the franchise’s other three films (Singham Returns, Simmba, and Sooryavanshi). Shetty’s “action design” is no longer as appealing.
Everything is aimed to be rendered with far more flourish than previously in this fifth installment of the Rohit Shetty Cop Universe franchise. However, all of the sanctimonious pomp and circumstance backfire.
The excessive amount of rhetoric and bravado that emerges from the plot and makes room for cameos by Simmba and Sooryavanshi as well as Salman Khan’s Chulbul Pandey, a creature of a different realm and sensibility (who appears in a mid-credits scene to give a preview of what might be coming in this universe), may please genre fans.
Naturally, Bajirao Singham is the one who is honest and that no one can stop when he loses his temper. He is Lord Ram. He is invincible. Stereotypes are applied to all of the male police officers in his immediate vicinity. Present day Garuda, personified by DCP Veer Sooryavanshi (Akshay Kumar), who arrives dangling from a helicopter, is incredibly sincere but becomes entangled in a web of names.
Mumbai street lingo-spouting, wisecracking Monkey God ACP Sangram Bhalerao alia Simmba (Ranveer Singh) loves to jump into tight spaces while beaming broadly. And the youthful, eager-beaver Lakshman, played by ACP Satya Bali (Tiger Shroff), who has three films to his credit, is always eager to learn from the old master.
Following well-trod ground, the actors led by Ajay Devgn—do their share, with Ranveer Singh contributing slightly more than the others. However, the payoff is negligible even when all the pieces are put together. The problem is that they do not have to do anything. They either try to offer comedic relief, give stuffy speeches about morality and duty, or strut around like models on a catwalk.
Ranveer Singh is by far Singham Again’s brightest spark. He is, for the most part, funny with his incessant chatter. Singham Again does not have much else that would make the audience chant “encore” in unison.
The line “Whatever I have learnt, I have learnt from you,” which Deepika Padukone’s character repeatedly tells Bajirao Singham, is definitely worthy of a full-length movie. That could give Cop Universe, starring Rohit Shetty, a boost.
Another outing would be too many for Singham himself. This cracker has no nous and only makes noise. Was there anyone who anticipated a different outcome?
- Cast:
- Ajay Devgn, Akshay Kumar, Ranveer Singh, Kareena Kapoor, Deepika Padukone, Arjun Kapoor, and Tiger Shroff
- Director:
- Rohit Shetty