Subedaar

There is not much that’s fresh about Subedaar, and the sandy, brown landscape is reminiscent of another Kapoor starrer, Thar. By standards of evil that villains are gauged, Prince is just a nasty punk who is not a strong enough antagonist for a man like Arjun, which is why their confrontations do not have that Richter scale of menace that could power a plot so predictable. (Think Rehman Dacait!) Of course, the villain will be defeated in a film -- that is never a spoiler -- but the process should be thrilling. It’s a walkover for Anil Kapoor. Aditya Rawal tries hard, but remains one-note. Radhikka Madan has a couple of good scenes, when she stands up to her harassers, but the father-daughter equation is never emotionally fraught because the misunderstanding could have been sorted with a normal conversation. Subedaar is not a boring film.

There is something undeniably stirring and faintly amusing about watching Anil Kapoor storm through Subedaar like an ageing Rambo who has swapped jungle warfare for small-town corruption. Strip away Anil Kapoor and you have a fairly standard action template; keep him, and you have gravitas, nostalgia and sinew holding the enterprise together.

But after the first hour, Subedaar begins to lose steam, despite the spirited background score by Rohan-Vinayak, which tries to inject some life into the proceedings. As long as the focus remains on Arjun, things work. But the back-and-forth between him and Prince quickly starts to feel repetitive. What also does not help is that the climax, clearly designed to rouse the audience with a cameo, does not quite land. The ending feels rushed, and many of the themes the film initially sets up simply evaporate. For example, we are shown a newspaper clipping for a brief amount of time to reveal what led to Arjun's personal loss. It misleads you into thinking it's connected to the overall plot, but it isn't. The sub-track, focusing on Shyama's own fight, doesn't make the intended impact.

On paper, each of these ideas feels important and compelling. But the film never stays with any of them long enough to create the impact it seems to be aiming for. At one point, the triggers driving the conflict also begin to feel odd. Maurya’s rage stems from damage done to his Gypsy, a vehicle tied to a dream his late wife once had. On the other side, Babli forces Prince to fight to retrieve a revolver whose silver polish was made using her dead mother’s jewellery. The sentiment attached to these objects is meant to deepen the emotional stakes, but it never quite translates on screen.

The tropes are right there, but the treatment freshens them. Maurya doesn’t show his hand–and his impressive handiwork– till the point he is pushed against a wall, with nowhere left to go, and then he breaks free. You know that a middle-aged fauji shouldn’t realistically be one up on a younger, fitter bunch, but Kapoor, as agile as he used to be, despite his weathered face, flattening them all, one by one, makes you believe. And cheer. That’s because he makes you care for his character, who was at the border, fighting the desh-ke-dushman, while his presence—or rather, lack of it– at his own home made the difference between life and death.

However, whether it’s the screen size or the execution, the shift in tone emerges as jarring in the film’s second half.