Stepping into a theatre after a year-long hiatus provided us with a giddy experience that ended exactly at the 10:23 am mark when the movie Mumbai Saga actually kicked off. The Sanjay Gupta-directed 135-minute saga is testosterone sealed and served in a bottle, failing the Bechdel test and sanity test in one flourishing swish of the camera. Supposedly based on true incidents, Mumbai Saga narrates the tale of a God-loving vegetable seller, Amartya (John Abraham) who becomes the next don of Mumbai, aided by Bhau (Mahesh Manjrekar) whose character is loosely based on a certain member of great political clout in Mumbai. The local goon lord who seems to be controlling the area from the confines of a jail, Gaitonde (Amole Gupte), needs to be uprooted and who could be a better pawn in this game than a red tilak-sporting, macho Amartya?

Amartya’s significant other, Seema (Kajal Aggarwal) finds immense joy and pride in watching her beau chop off a hand of a goon and beat people to a pulp, encouraging his advent into the world of crime. His Achilles’ heel happens to be his younger brother Arjun (Prateik Babbar) who is shadowed from all the violence ensuing in his older brother’s world by being shipped off to a boarding school and later London. However, blood is thicker than the water of the Thames and our young lad is back to pick up arms and help his older brother out in a time of distress. Halfway through the movie, five seconds before the interval, we catch a glimpse of inspector Vijay Savarkar (Emraan Hashmi) who is out for Amartya’s life of course, not because duty demands so and instead fuelled by 10-crore prize money offered by a grieving wife of an industrialist who is murdered in the very first scene of the film. The plot vaguely makes sense but the overpowering dialogues and the fight sequence that bombard you at 10-second intervals will take away the little bit of sense left in it.

One would think that the pandemic and the subsequent lockdown that had the shoot of the film paused for a while would lend certain depth to writers but that too is an unfair expectation to have, it turned out. Prepare to hear gems like “Tune beta nahin baap paida kiya hain” (You haven’t birthed a son, but a father) and “Kismat gari ke gear jaisa hota hai. Time pe badal li toh zindagi ki speed badh jati hai” (Fortune is like gears in your car. If you change it in time, your life takes off) and face palm your way out of the theatre. The pandemic had us glued to our screens gorging on crime stories from the underbelly of cities and towns like Sacred Games and Mirzapur where attention to details and the craft of each character had us involved in the plot. So now when we see a freshly-pressed linen shirt on the protagonist stuck in jail, the night after an epic fight, it strikes discord inside. We have upped our game Bollywood, why must you continue to serve us drivel?

If one was to take away the crudely-shot fight sequences using a wide-angle camera lens and slow-motion button, there won’t be anything left in Mumbai Saga. It’s safe to say that this movie will not be the ‘welcome back to the theatres’ extravaganza that we’d secretly hoped for it to be. Instead, it will make you want to crawl back into your covers with your laptop cradled in your arms, ready to hibernate for another year. And if your wish to step out still persists, don’t complain that we didn’t warn you.