Baadshaho

The dullness of the script is the major problem of the latest Milan Luthria film Baadshaho. Written by Rajat Arora, this film is pampered by countless filmy heroic dialogues which don’t make the film any better. Luthria, who made movies like Dirty Picture and Once upon A time in Mumbai, tries to recreate the 70’s again, but this time the execution was underwhelming.

The film is set in the time of the emergency. A politician who is angry at the queen of a dynasty in Rajasthan decides to recover all the gold her palace possessed during the time of emergency. The gold was supposed to get shifted to Delhi via a military truck. The film Baadshaho tells us how the chief security officer Bhavani Singh of the queen tries to get back the gold from the hands of the authorities.

It’s a heist movie that takes a really long time to get in to the main act and when it finally starts the heist, everything that happens on screen look unappealing. The pattern of heist movies one knows gets followed here as well, but the disappointment increases as zero attention to detail was given to many of the plot points. You tend to question the sensibility of almost all the scenes in the film and Luthria and Rajat Arora’s tactic to cover them in dialogbazi doesn’t really work here. Even the climax of the film has this awkward ending that made me wonder whether they stopped filming due to lack of budget.

It is the shallow nature of the script that derails this film. Milan Luthria is struggling to add layers to his characters. And there is a sense of eccentricity in the way each character behaves. Milan Luthria might have intended to create the kind of charm he gave to his characters in films like OUATIM or Dirty Picture. But here the lifeless writing from Rajat Arora only makes those characterizations look lame on screen. The screenplay isn’t trying to be innovative at all. Outdated is the one word verdict about it and there is zero unpredictability to the narrative. Sometimes it is hard to understand the timeline of the events. Cinematography was nice and so was the music.

Ajay Devgn is in that moody angry mode throughout the film and Baadshaho hardly demands anything from him apart from the slang. Emraan Hashmi’s semi comical role is occasionally funny. Ileana D’Cruz was convincing as the queen. Esha Gupta was extremely poor in that character with no real space in the story. Looking at the number of moments Sanjay Mishra made me laugh, I wish he had more space and lines in the film. Vidyut Jamwal looks funny in that fake mustache.

Baadshaho is a movie that should have been made after doing a lot of research. Instead the makers just placed the movie in the 70’s and created a scenario that has nothing new to give you hope. Attitude dialogues are not enough to make compelling commercial entertainers.

Rating: 2/5