Sunny Deol bellows (but of course)! He fells four able-bodied men with one swing of his dhai kilo ka haath. He spins a wheel on one hand and unleashes it on the enemy like a Sudarshan Chakra. Even when he runs in slo-mo, the earth below him shakes and shivers (Taylor Swift’s fans should learn a thing or two about causing seismic activity from this film). He picks up a hammer — Thor ain’t no match for Tara — and sends an entire jeep flying into the air. He eyes a handpump for several seconds in the only instance of sexual tension in the film but only has to threaten to uproot it for his adversaries to run helter-skelter. At one point, he screams so hard that a man about to chop him into pieces stops dead in his tracks, drops his sword and just stares at Tara stupefied.
Tara Singh is the same tour de force we first encountered 22 years ago. This rough-around-the-edges action man-superhuman-patriot-romantic, despite being laced with a generous dose of jingoism (and possibly because of it), remains one of the most memorable characters in Hindi cinema.
But Gadar hasn’t aged well — I attempted a painful rewatch earlier this week — and its sequel, made more than two decades after the first film, may reel in audiences on the basis of both nostalgia and nationalism, but is so outdated in look and feel that it appears to have been stitched together using rejected footage from the first film, lying somewhere in cold storage, that someone accidentally chanced upon.
Or maybe director Anil Sharma was just waiting for his son to grow up. Because Gadar 2, for most of its posterior-paralysing 170 minutes, serves as a showcase for Utkarsh Sharma. The boy, who played Tara and Sakina’s (Ameesha Patel) knee-high son in Gadar, is now a man in his 20s and has more screentime than Sunny Deol, at least in Half One. Which is, of course, pretty mortifying because Sunny, for whatever it’s worth, brings both action and emotion to the film. Utkarsh, on the other hand, is wooden enough to put a piece of plywood to shame.
Utkarsh is expected to fight, sing, dance, romance, laugh, cry, defend his country, rescue his dad and be a mamma’s boy, but he executes everything with the same dead (minus pan) look. The ironic thing is that his Jeetey harbours ambitions of becoming an actor. In fact, for a large part of the film, Utkarsh sounds like Dharmendra with a blocked nose. Dad Sharma’s expectations from Utkarsh are so high that in one action scene, he even makes him do Parkour. The athletic discipline was invented only in the ’90s. But Utkarsh does it a good two decades earlier.
The year is 1971, with India and Pakistan on the brink of war again. Pakistan is unequivocally portrayed as a bloodthirsty, monstrous nation. Tara Singh, having killed a sizeable number of Pakistani soldiers in the first film, is a wanted man in the country, with Pakistan’s forever-snarling army general Hamid Iqbal (a one-note Manish Wadhwa whose ‘kafir’ sounds more like ‘coffee’) baying for his blood. Tara supposedly gets captured by Pakistan while functioning as civil hired transport for the Indian army, and Jeetey takes off incognito for the country across the border to rescue his dad. Tara resurfaces just before the interval, having been in some sort of coma (I would have been too by that time if the film wasn’t so loud and noisy), and also takes off for Pakistan with the same ease as Bollywood jets off to the Maldives, to rescue his son. Sakina, in the meanwhile, pines for both husband and son, with a perfectly-done French manicure, Dyson-wrapped curls and a perpetually vacuous expression.
The first half of Gadar 2 is painfully languid, with Sunny having little presence. It’s only in Half Two that the film kicks into some sort of action, even if it’s over-the-top. While I understand that the genre of the film demands it to be both outrageous and melodramatic, Gadar 2 is in no way a well-made film.
In fact, Anil Sharma’s style of film-making is so dated that father and son, walking through streets in Lahore whose walls are plastered with their ‘most wanted’ posters, resort to the most musty Hindi film trope (second only to joining two broken pieces of a locket) to trace each other — they break into a song. Thankfully, Gadar 2 uses most of the first film’s chartbuster songs — Udd ja kaale kaava to Main nikla gaddi leke — in their original form and doesn’t resort to remixing them. Arijit Singh and Mithoon team up for the mint-fresh Dil jhoom, which is one of the few redeeming features of the film.
Given the huge hype and massive ticket sales that have already been recorded, I have no doubt that Gadar 2 will shatter all box-office records and create some new milestones along the way. But as Hindi film history has shown us, badly-made films and big box office often have an inversely proportional relationship with each other. ‘Gutter’ 2 will only be the latest on that list.
Priyanka Roy
I liked/ didn’t like Gadar 2 because... Tell t2@abp.in
