It sounded like
a cool pairing – the darkly fun Tigmanshu Dhulia, coming off Paan Singh Tomar and Saheb Biwi and Gangster Returns, in
collaboration with Saif Ali Khan as a pulpy goonda. It pains me to say that despite
a few isolated fun moments, Bullet Raja
is a stale and forgettable movie.
I love Tigmanshu
Dhulia. I love that he'll go to any extent to craft a funny line, and he really
knows how to construct Virat Hindu Villains. Having said that, his latest movie
has a crossroad. On one hand you could call Bullet
Raja better than most Simbly South remake style movies because it avoids
the grating visual tackiness of that genre. On the other hand you could call this
film the worst Dhulia flick because it takes a clever concept and does nothing
with it.
Here the hero Raja
is an Uttar Pradesh ka goonda, a bearded, henna dyed, Bullet-riding, chick
magnet macho man. Raja sucks at love, plots revenge, and well, let's just say Bullet Raja doesn't exactly work as a throwback
or as a dark comedy thriller. And as pulpy entertainment it fares even worse. The
movie is called Bullet Raja and the hero never does anything awesome with his
Royal Enfield or his revolver’s bullets. Saif plays the cocksure swaggerer,
with Jimmy Shergil as his bestie, together they are a UP goonda gang and they
wander from place to place, perpetually doing gangstergiri. On paper this
should work, but it doesn’t. Saif and Shergill are forever mumbling and snoring
their way through the movie, and it doesn’t help in making us care for this
unexciting duo. There’s Ravi Kishan who dresses up as a woman while having sex
with another woman in a saree - and stuff like this fails to both funny and
pulpy. Every UP-wale-daakoo character waddles onto the screen and snoozes
through the set pieces.
At times we'll
be offered doses of Dhulia’s clever one liners, but they’re offset by the
wearisome look of the film. Lensed in bland shots (in which some characters
speak directly into the camera with grim faces), Bullet Raja is one hell of a dry looking movie. Combine the dreary
visual style with a deafening tone that pretty much reeks of Prabhudeva’s masterpieces,
this movie is the textbook definition of a stillborn action comedy. It has no
rhythm or panache or any trace of the naughtiness found in Dhulia’s earlier
films. There's a superficial backbone about Raja trying to find a job and being
forced into goondagardi but it exists only as a coat hanger on which to hang a
random and disjointed series of skits. Toss in an excessively horrendous score
by Sajid-Wajid and you're looking at one hot mess of a movie.
Did I laugh a
few times? Absolutely. There’s a scene where Saif escapes his chaser by jumping
through a glass window and people around him stand and clap. Give Dhulia a word
document and put Saif on the camera for two and a half hours and you're bound
to find a few giggles from the footage. But the laughs delivered in this film
are painfully few and far in between. For the amount of entertainment that Bullet Raja has to offer I'd say it's
more worthy of a lazy TV watch. Once all the boring ‘backstory’ bits are dealt
with in the first half you'll be treated to a short series of dialogue baazi
that doubles as action sequences – Saif vs Chunky Pandey, Saif vs Raj Babbar,
Saif vs Vipin Sharma. And after Sonakshi Sinha’s Bong actress moves in with
Saif and Shergill after having met them once, the film gets all deep and
serious as if it expects you to find and extract one sincere drop of emotion
from these terribly written characters.
Saif struts
through the movie under the impression that acting is optional in this movie. We’ve
seen what he is capable of in Omkara,
and he was pretty darn good in Ek Haseena
Thi – he is miscast in this role because he just can’t pull off a showy gun
trotting slightly OTT gangsta without going into the farcical zone. As for
Sonakshi, after seeing her nuanced performance in Lootera it looked like she was moving beyond the cash grabby roles
but Bullet Raja marks her worst
performance to date. The very pretty Vidyut Jamwal wanders through the film
doing Kung Fu Karate kicks, careful to never take the spotlight away from the
camera-hogging superstar hero. And if there's one universal rule of filmmaking
it is this - when you get Gulshan Grover in your movie, you better give the guy
some good material to work with. Bullet
Raja manages to make even Gulshan Grover seem tedious, and for that I
dislike the film even more. But it'll take more than one disaster before I wash
my hands of Dhulia. Let's just call this one a small mistake and wait for his
next great film.
(First published in Firstpost)
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