Liger

It is not frequent that you watch a so-called big-budget film and wonder how on earth any studio head could green-light something like this. Liger, directed by Puri Jagannadh, falls in this category, and it is a movie that has zero regard for the intelligence of the audience. With an absolute garbage script that shuttles between shitty romance and forgettable fight sequences, Liger takes the audience for granted in the most insulting way.

Our hero Liger (Yeah, that’s his name on his Aadhar Card) comes to Mumbai with his mother. He has a stuttering issue, and just like his father, he wants to be an MMA fighter. For that, he needs training, and the mother and son seek help from the man who was defeated by his father. The journey of Liger to become an MMA international champion is what we see in Liger.

Let me tell you how a song pops up in this movie. Liger’s mother is angry at him for falling in love with Tanya as it affects his concentration. And when Tanya, Poo of 2022, calls him, his mother takes the call and screams at her like Shyju Damodaran during an ISL match, and the poor girl gets drunk and goes dancing at some random wedding and tada! You have a song. The way the movie’s plot shifts from romance to MMA and vice versa is the most unpredictable thing about this movie. The heroine Tanya falls for Liger only for his looks, and Puri Jagannadh considers that wafer-thin romance (can’t even call it romance) a valid central conflict in this movie.

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Puri Jagannadh may have announced this movie thinking he would do his version of the underdog boxing story. But the interest in showing mixed martial arts is very minimal. Random fights in between a series of songs where the heroine is wearing designer clothes are the major chunk of Liger. The MMA bits are pretty flat, and if you are as shallow as Tanya, you can ogle at Vijay Deverakonda’s body and feel satisfied. If Kanan and Biswa are planning to relaunch Pretentious Movie Reviews, I would suggest this as the perfect movie for that purpose. A clueless Puri Jagannath uses jingoism to boost up the energy, and it only increased the speed at which my brain cells were getting damaged.

Vijay Deverakonda as Liger is fine as the character largely because of the believable physique. His patriotic outbursts looked funny on screen, and the credit for that should go to the writing department. During the promotions of this movie, there were articles that praised Ananya Pandey for voicing her opinion strongly when Vijay Deverakonda justified misogyny in Arjun Reddy. And the same person has opted for Liger, in which her character is perhaps among the trashiest characters ever written in a Hindi movie. Ramya Krishnan, as the motivating mother, looks like what if the KGF mother character was on steroids? Chunkey Pandey is the Chellam sir of Puri Jagannadh. Ronit Roy plays the role of the coach. Last but not least, we have the legendary boxer, Mike Tyson, playing a character named Mark Anderson. In that humiliating club of shame, Sylvestor Stallone is no longer alone #KambhaktIshq.

Liger is one of those movies where each minute in that film can be trolled for its mediocrity. There is a fight sequence where many women are fighting Liger, and he asks them why are you all beating me? Have I made you pregnant? Liger is a pointless mishmash of songs, screams, and fights.