When a film has a song (or some such) where the words go: ‘Yeh hain eye of the tiger. Peechey se vaar karta hain kaayar. Main likhta hoon shaayar,’ you know that things will only go downhill. Consistently kissing the lowest depths of both plot and performance is Ganapath: A Hero is Born, a film that slaps together a host of below-average elements — writing to direction, acting to music — with the ardent hope that something will stick. Nothing, absolutely nothing, does.

This is a pity because Ganapath had the potential to be an extremely engaging futuristic thriller and a succinct social commentary on the difference between the haves and have-nots, one that is already prevalent in society, but further chasmed in a post-apocalyptic world.

Starring Tiger Shroff in the title role, Ganapath has a solid premise and does make for engaging storytelling in parts, especially in the bit where Tiger’s wayward Guddu metamorphoses into warrior Ganapath, a messiah of the masses in a totalitarian society where the poor have been pushed to the fringes of the land.

When we first meet Guddu, he’s in bed with half a dozen women, with one even emerging from his bathtub. Guddu is a casanova without a care in the world and the next 30 minutes serve up a drawling commentary on how his charmed life in Silver City, predominantly spent in a nightclub called Dirty People, includes choosing the best fighters in the land for his boss John the Englishman (with nothing ‘English’ about him) to place bets on to further the business empire of the film’s chief villain Dalini (baby name books seem to be at a premium in year 2070).

A falling out with John the Englishman (who is mute, but ‘talks’ without moving his lips through a chip literally close to his shoulder) sees Guddu being banished to the outliers. From the hedonistic luxuries of Silver City, Guddu stumbles into a world which looks like a bargain-basement version of Mad Max... on a good day. There he meets and falls in love with the spunky Jassi (Kriti Sanon) who lives in a sort of cave which I last saw in the Harappa-Mohenjodaro chapter of my history book in school.

Once there, Guddu learns that he is the one — aka Ganapath — who the marginalised masses have been waiting for decades to rescue them from their existing lives, as predicted by their leader and Guddu’s grandfather (Amitabh Bachchan employing that baritone to maximum effect in a role which couldn’t have been longer than a sole sentence on paper).

Guddu turns into Ganapath within the course of one eminently forgettable song. In short, he now becomes Tiger Shroff — flying in the air, landing chops and kicks and also delivering a unique mix of dance and fight inside the ring. Some of it is thrilling — the action sequences are very well choreographed — but in the absence of any emotional connection with the characters or their tragic stories, there is very little of Ganapath that remains in one’s memory once you exit the audi.

In Super 30, Vikas Bahl — who also directs Ganapath — told the moving and inspirational real-life story of a teacher who tutored a bunch of slum kids, the competitive exams that they cracked with limited resources at their disposal, becoming a metaphor for the rise of the marginalised. We felt for the teacher (played by Hrithik Roshan) as much as we felt for his proteges, with almost all of them inviting the viewer’s emotional investment through a relatable backstory.

The have-nots in Ganapath, in comparison, are faceless, nameless entities, each more indistinguishable than the other, with soot inexplicably covering all of them. There is not a single character who you will find your heart beating for.

Jassi, played by Kriti, is saddled with a backstory of a missing mother gone over to the other side that feels both superficial and thrust in as an afterthought. To her credit, Kriti — whose action scenes are good enough to rival Tiger’s — is one of the rare bright spots in Ganapath. She does well in the emotional scenes and handles nunchucks like a bawse. Despite looking like she hasn’t bathed in years, her kohl-lined eyes speak of the generous availability of Bobbi Browns and Huda Beautys even in treacherous, barren terrain in a ravaged, post-apocalyptic world.

Kriti’s Heropanti co-star Tiger — the two debuted together with that film nine years ago and haven’t shown any improvement in their chemistry (or the lack of it) since — plays to his strengths, namely action and dance. But the question really is: how long will Tiger keep playing to his strengths and not deliver anything else? I doubt he wants to answer that.

Ganapath labours on for 135 minutes, with Bahl trying to throw in a lame twist which one (if you are still awake by then) would sniff a mile away. So is an AI-inspired climax with which the film ends abruptly, preparing us for what Bollywood is now doing to its dystopian/ mythological/ sci-fi biggies — whipping up a Part Two. The first film was a warning.

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