After airlifting Indians from strike-ridden Kuwait (Airlift), extraditing a most-wanted fugitive in the garb of a patient (Baby), batting for the cause of toilets for women in rural areas (Toilet: Ek Prem Katha), whipping up low-cost sanitary pads (Pad Man), 'orchestrating' the Mars Orbiter Mission (Mission Mangal) and fighting tooth and nail to establish that the Ram Setu is 'man-made' (Ram Setu), Akshay Kumar "the saviour" now digs deeper.
This time, the actor's 'Great Bharat Rescue' goes down into a mine. But the writing is so shallow and the performances so uneven, that his latest, Mission Raniganj, degenerates into the kind of film where a one-line winner of an idea translates into a film both messy and melodramatic.
Like most recent Akshay films, Mission Raniganj: The Great Bharat Rescue attempts to bring a real-life story to the screen. This one took place in the last year of the 1980s in a coalmine in Raniganj where 65 miners are rescued from a mine filled with water and noxious fumes in a race against time and employing ingenuity and jugaad, that favourite Indian word that describes all kinds of hacks, big or small. Many players are at work here. But the hero, of course, is Akshay's character, Jaswant Singh Gill.
A general manager (but described condescendingly as a "junior officer" at a mining company), Gill swung into action the moment the tragedy struck, but was impeded by lack of resources as well as internal politics, coloured by the cutthroat unionism that existed in Bengal at the time. Mission Raniganj has a great one-line idea — that of a man's quick thinking and never-give-up attitude egging him on to fight against all odds to launch a rescue operation dictated more by the heart than by the head — but this Tinu Suresh Desai directorial just doesn't have any meat to see it sail through 138 minutes.
Moreover, Desai — just like he did it with Rustom, another Akshay Kumar starrer — relies unnecessarily on too much histrionics to pad up this particular slice of history. The result is a film that screeches and screams with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. Desai, who has probably watched Lagaan one time too many, also believes that a series of men, women, children (and a street dog) constantly wailing and screaming in the background, adds more drama and emotions to his film. For the record, it does not.
Neither does Jaswant Gill's love story, something that was probably snuck into the writing to give Parineeti Chopra much-needed employment. Just like Kesri — again opposite Akshay — Parineeti has a half-blink-and-you-miss role here, which contributes zilch to the story.
Once the dust settles down (pun intended), Mission Raniganj, to be honest, is a partly engaging evacuation drama. The audaciousness of Gill's plan — to launch a handmade metal capsule underground by drilling a 29-inch hole in record time and bring up as many as 65 stranded miners one by one even as the minutes tick by — is well executed, with Akshay thankfully keeping his act subdued. The gritty mission has many an obstacle in its course, most of them brought on by the fact that something like this hadn't been attempted before, but it is Gill's extreme positivity and unshakeable belief in the face of adversity that sees him tide through.
We wish we could say the same about the film. Mission Raniganj relies on the kind of over-the-top drama that has sadly come to be associated with Bollywood commercial films of this genre. Grating background music, from reel first to reel final, is used to accentuate every word and emotion, the beats being so loud that they often drown out both words and emotions. With a competition of sorts playing out to see what gets to the miners first — Gill's jugaadu capsule or an incline being constructed by another party with vested interests — the drama often degenerates into saas-bahu territory. The miners, led by Ravi Kishan, ham it up, with Jameel Khan's leader of the pack being the sole exception.
And then, of course, are the caricatures. Almost every talented actor from this part of the country — Kharaj Mukherjee to Dibyendu Bhattacharya to Rajesh Sharma — is reduced to a stereotype crowned by the kind of accent that Bollywood thinks that every Bengali who speaks in Hindi has. Even other actors of importance, many of which contribute richly to any ensemble they are part of, are shortchanged. Kumud Mishra, as Gill's boss, does little else but shiver and smoke a cigarette, often both at the same time. Pavan Malhotra, wearing a wig that looks suspiciously like an upturned flower pot with tendril-like growths, is another fine actor who doesn't have much to do. Arif Zakaria and Shishir Sharma suffer the same fate. The subtitles are hit worse — at one point, laddoo is translated into 'piece of ball.'
The last few minutes of Mission Raniganj are nail-biting, to be honest, but when you know its Akshay inside the capsule — hence the name 'Capsule Gill' which the real-life braveheart came to be known by and which formed the initial title of this film — then there is no fear. Jaswant Gill may fail, but our resident Khiladi will not. After all, there are so many more 'rescue' films waiting to be made. 'Vikram Lander' loading!
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