By Tatsam Mukherjee
Singham Again might be the most half-hearted, insincere film in Rohit Shetty’s career of two decades. Which is saying a lot, given that Shetty is a shining example of mainstream Hindi cinema’s convenient, shameless and shrewd populism.
Just look at his simplistic understanding of gender roles and patriotism, how he will blow the conch for Hindutva forces and alternate it with some of his insidious Islamophobia (like in Sooryavanshi and Indian Police Force), and his unsubtle endorsement for extra-judicial killings and custodial torture.
Like most of his peers, Shetty will say anything to get a clap out of his audience. It doesn’t matter how daft it sounds.
Like in a scene where a young boy asks his mother, who apparently works as a bureaucrat for the current government: “Did Ram really travel 3,000 km to save Sita?” The response is: “Of course, it’s a fact.”
Even in a Rohit Shetty film, where idiotic dialogue is par for the course, this line sticks out.
This comes shortly after a sequence plays out like a recruitment video for a Kashmir first-responder unit. It concludes with our protagonist (Ajay Devgn) coming face-to-face with a group of Kashmiri youth, right after he has captured a terrorist.
Shetty builds up the tension for a hostile confrontation, but then a young man blurts out, “Stone-pelting is a thing of the past. This is naya Bharat’s naya Kashmir.” Expectedly, a drone shot of the tricolour on Lal Chowk follows after this exchange.
This story was originally published in thewire.in. Read the full story here.
