Agni Review | A Potent and Pertinent Premise Undone by Burned-Out Writing Techniques

The thankless lives of firefighters and the kind of obstacles they face in their line of work is something we have not really seen in films, and even in real life, one could say they have not been celebrated or respected for the kind of risk they take. The new Rahul Dholakia film Agni, which got a direct OTT release via Amazon Prime Video, is one film that wants to shed light on the disrespect firefighters get in our society. While the movie does manage to cover the checklist of issues they want to address, the screenplay here has a very familiar template, and any cinephile could guess what would happen to any character in the next scene.

So, the story is set in 2017, and Vittahl Rao, our hero, is a senior officer in the Mumbai Fireforce. Vittahl and his team are constantly on the job, and the lack of respect is really demotivating them. At home, Vittahl’s own son prefers to admire his supercop uncle rather than his father. At one point, Vittahl’s team member Amvi tells him about the possibility of all the recent fire accidents being part of an arson. The efforts of the firefighters to find the truth behind this is what we see in Agni.

As I already mentioned, the film is basically trying to make a point about how less celebrated firefighters are. Like, the building construction permissions are given in ways that don’t think much about the accessibility of the fire brigade when an accident happens. After dealing with something heartbreaking, Vittahl Rao talks about how people are filling stairs and fire escapes with stuff and then blames the authorities and the fire force for not protecting them. Since the force has rarely been a subject of focus in our movies, making them the center of the action easily gives the film the advantage of having a fresh premise.

But the storytelling is on the weaker side. Dholakia and Vijay Mauriya are creating the drama in the story in the most familiar way possible. When you see Rao’s son worshipping his uncle Samit for the flashy supercop thing he does, anyone with basic film literacy would know what will eventually happen. And the moment you see a couple planning a future in a romantic mood, it is quite obvious that a tragedy is pretty much heading their way. Dholakia is not even trying to tweak or delay the occurrence of these predictable payoffs, and that really makes it a film that is seriously lacking craft in narrating the tale.

The dialogue in certain patches of the movie is catchy despite being overtly filmy. KU Mohanan’s cinematography uses saturated colors in frames, which sort of intensifies the drama in scenes and gives a subtle cue about the nature of the scene. I loved how the swirling drone shots were used precisely for the shots where fire force vehicles were on the move. The visual effects rendering was fine, but I guess, in certain scenes, they forgot to tell the actors about where the fire would come from.

Pratik Gandhi, as Vittahl Rao, performs the desperation, anger, and fragile side of the character neatly on the screen. He is rarely overdoing the dramatic bits in the film, and that helps the movie keep that anger in a realistic space. Divyendu Sharma’s police role felt more like an extended cameo, and looking at the way he eventually becomes a cheerleader of the firemen, a lot of the sequences that were meant to show us his way of working felt more like forcefully added sequences just to give the audience some Munna Bhaiyya entertainment. Saiyami Kher and Sai Tamhankar have characters that aren’t that demanding. But they both have delivered sincere performances. Actor Jitendra Joshi also gets to play a prominent character in the movie.

Even though the film has this whodunit thriller format, the characters, and events are always revolving around the central theme. And I really liked how they built an antagonist with a valid reason. But the tools to build this relevant tale were the burned-out ones, and since you have seen it a zillion times in multiple other films, it is pretty easy to figure out the foreshadowing from dialogues. If the screenplay had made a cautious effort to make things different from what people would have imagined, something I feel a “Sookshamdarshini” did so effectively, Agni’s intention to make people more civic in safety would have worked.