Manjrekar will also have to justify the presence of producer and brother-in-law Salman Khan to guarantee a good opening. So the role of police officer Rajveer Singh, who confronts Rahul, becomes over-proportionate and stifles the sound of the film.
This week, good old Mahesh Manjrekar joins capable filmmakers like Rahul Rawail and Satish Kaushik who have been roped in to launch/revive family products on a track that is tried and trusted by the bigwigs of Bollywood. When in form, Manjrekar has the ability to engage the audience with old-fashioned melodrama. In Praveen Tarde’s Marathi hit, mulshi pattern, Here, He Has Powerful Stuff to work, but the presence of a star almost overpowers his expression.
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Considering the protest of farmers, it is easy to relate to the underlying theme of the social cost of the film’s development. There is a farmer (Sachin Khedekar) who is forced to sell his land. He spends most of his money on family obligations and is reduced to a security worker who once guarded his own farms. He is humiliated for plucking vegetables from the land he once plowed.
His son Rahul (Ayush Sharma) fails to process this change, where human dignity and social status are usually not counted while arriving at the cost of agricultural land. When the family moves to Pune, Rahul becomes one of wall Doc scene that kind of situation where an angry young man makes someone else’s fight his own.
It delves into a chain of events and Rahul is caught in a vortex of crime and politics, separating him from his conscientious father. Like Vijay before, Rahul is not only chased by Law and rival gangsters, his conscience tries to catch him too.
Unlike many recent Bollywood films, Manjrekar does not normalize corruption. He makes it a game of equal opportunity for characters on both sides of the moral divide. Rahul’s school teacher spits on him when he tries to grab his land. Manda’s alcoholic father (Manjrekar himself in a cute cameo), the girl (Mahima Makwana makes a confident debut) is in love with Rahul, who says that when he buys a headache medicine after checking the expiry date, he is in love with her. How can I invest in a boy whose shelf life is so short? Honest policeman’s hands are tied by corrupt political masters but he can still show his place to a gangster or a selfish lawyer. Such scenes are reminiscent of the Salim Javed era of mainstream cinema where the protagonist was constantly mirrored.
Manjrekar is also attracted by his biggest hits, Reality, As one could see Raghu’s shades in Rahul. Aayush’s body language and dialogue delivery are reminiscent of Sanjay Dutt’s portrayal of a boy who gets caught in a quagmire of crime, and slowly struggles to choose between right and wrong.
Like Sanjay, Ayush also always puts a bindi on his forehead. One could have told him that the crease should develop or decrease automatically depending on the intensity of the scene.
Let us tell you that in his second film, Aayush is not bad at all. He can hold his own in front of seasoned actors like Khedekar and Upendra Limaye, he has a deep time and the camera loves him.
However, Manjrekar will also have to justify the presence of producer and brother-in-law Salman Khan to guarantee a good opening. So the role of police officer Rajveer Singh, who confronts Rahul, becomes over-proportionate and stifles the sound of the film.
Actually, Salman is less than the expectations. With no back story, he inexplicably chooses to play Rajveer in a safe, restrained manner. Had he brought a little more color to the air-brushed Sikh character, his fight with Rahul would have been even more fun. Perhaps, he wanted Aayush to be noticed, but his stern presence neither helps the cause of the film nor his fans.
Also, every time Rajveer enters the scene, the background score goes up by a few decibels. The theme song shows that Brother A kind of replacement of God during a crisis. If Salman wanted to play a character, why did he keep his off-screen baggage?
The songs are pedestrian, action average and the idea of pitting two rival gangs of police against each other has been used by Ram Gopal Varma so many times that it has lost its novelty. The saving grace is that even when the narrative loosens up, it doesn’t lose its moral fiber.
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