Set in the early ’80s, the retro setting and the freshness of the idea of an income tax raid of mammoth proportions made Raj Kumar Gupta’s 2018 film Raid a passable watch with some sporadic moments of smart heroism. It had a structure where the hero met the villain in the beginning, and then it gradually became a power tussle between them. When it comes to the sequel, Raid 2, which is set in 1989, the film is larger in terms of the size of the raid, and perhaps, because of the aura of the new antagonist. But the structure of the story is more or less the same, and hence, you rarely feel any sense of intrigue in the way the story gets developed.
Amay Patnaik is in Rajasthan, and he decides to raid the king’s house there. Despite the king showing his muscle power, the cunning Patnaik manages to finish the raid. But, it came at the cost of getting transferred again, and this time, he was transferred to Bhoj, a place ruled by a politician named Manohar Dhankar, aka Dada Bhai. The history of philanthropy of Dada Bhai puts him under the radar of Amay Patnaik, and what we see is Patnaik’s efforts to find out how Manohar was doing the tax fraud.
If you watch the trailer of Raid 2, you would feel that the antagonist here has so many layers of solid shields that Amay Patnaik’s usual way of ripping off pillows and breaking fake pillars to find gold and cash won’t work this time. But in the movie, Dada Bhai is just a glorified Tauji whose manpower and political power are slightly bigger than the previous film’s villain. The format is the same here as well. We have the cordial meeting between the hero and villain, and then we have the surprise raid, and eventually, when the villain has no choice, he decides to take control of things through assault. The only major change is the fact that, while the first movie was, in a way, a single-day story, here, the events are happening over a period of time. Even though the villain is more powerful, his deeds are designed to make things easy for Amay Patnaik.
Raid is one franchise where we don’t really see Ajay Devgn getting involved in fight sequences, and his character is more of a man of tactics. With the punch dialogues written by Ritesh Shah, Devgn carries the sharpness and heroics required for this character. Riteish Deshmukh is playing the role of the antagonist, Dada Bhai, and his performance in the earlier part of the story, where his character is more in control, is pretty good. As I already said, the way the script puts that character in a difficult spot feels a bit silly, and hence, when the character turns mad, the performance starts to feel a bit flimsy. Ileana D’Cruz was replaced this time with Vaani Kapoor, and the character mostly has no relevance other than dancing in two songs. Maybe to make that character less inconsequential, Gupta and his writers are assigning one part of the duty to this wife character. Saurabh Shukla reprises his role from the first film, and the man with his dialogue rendering style is always fun to watch. Amit Sial gets a role with more significance and screen time this time.
Raid 2 definitely looks like a compromised product that has been intervened by the studio to make it a package in the era of Pushpa. There is a pointless Tamannah Bhatia item number in the movie. There are two song sequences featuring the family of Amay Patnaik, which was blended fairly into the narrative but still for the sake of selling an album. And at the end of the movie, we have a Honey Singh song featuring him and Jacqueline Fernandez. The ironic part is that even though the film has all these new songs, the most effective one that blends with the narrative is the original “Black” song composed by Amit Trivedi. Other than the scaling up of the raid, there isn’t much change here on an idea level. They are trying to make this one look like the toughest operation in Amay Patnaik’s professional life. But this Abbas-Mustan style “this was all part of the plan” kind of heroism is somewhat an outdated trope.
The first movie in the franchise was a watchable film that had a hero and team who were grounded. In fact, that movie was loosely based on a real-life raid that happened in the 80s. But when it comes to Raid 2, even though there is a bigger villain and Patnaik is in a seemingly powerless position, Raj Kumar Gupta is very much repeating the same beats, with a lot of very evident compromises like an item number. If you were a big fan of the first film, this second installment might feel like a passable film with familiar elements.
