Jigra Review | A Melodramatic Burnout With a Superb Alia Bhatt

In the earlier portions of the movie Jigra, we see an unflinching Alia Bhatt handling multiple responsibilities with great precision and almost in a very emotionless manner. Since we have seen the trailer and know the premise of the film, this detail somewhat enhances the expectations of a phenomenal action movie being on the cards. But the writing is finding itself in a bit of a spot in making the idea look coherent on screen. While the characterizations are truly great, the way they have designed the prison break looks too convenient and, to an extent, exhausting.

So Satyabhama Anand, aka Satya, and her little brother Ankur Anand are our main characters. They both lost their parents at a very young age, and Satya has been very protective of her brother. The siblings have grown up with a relative who was emotionally distant from them but took care of them. At one point, the family likes Ankur’s idea for a business, and he goes to a country named Hanshi Dao to find investors. He was accompanied by the son of the couple who foster-parented them. The two, unfortunately, get involved in a legal mess because of the other guy. Since that country was extremely strict about drug-related cases, the family saved their son by putting the blame on Ankur. How Satya handles this situation where she has to get her brother out of a foreign prison is what we see in this movie.

Whatever I have said happens in the first 30 minutes of the movie, and if you have seen the trailer, this much detail is pretty much available. The film introduces Satya in a very precise way, giving us an idea about what she could possibly do. But the real struggle for Vasan Bala is setting up this whole prison break chapter. Whenever you think about how she is going to pull this off, something or the other will fall in favor of her, like how she gets gang members in that country to set up her plan. When I saw the trailer, I was expecting to see a smart plan of a single-minded girl. But when it comes to the film, there are so many characters and complications that the prison break part of the story takes the backseat.

Vasan Bala, whose movies are known for their quirkiness, is trying to add that sense of quirkiness to an extremely cheesy brother-sister story. While he succeeds in that in the earlier portions of the movie, after half an hour, we only get to see glimpses of the Vasan Bala treatment as melodrama and convenient twists take over the script. Maybe Vasan Bala and his co-writer Debashish Irengbam sensed the blandness and decided to make the prisonbreak a bit more complicated by including a Plan B, which our leading lady doesn’t know. But it all only stretched the film rather than making us feel bad for the characters or making us nervous or excited.

The melodramatic high points in the film’s last quarter are struggling to land smoothly. The ultra-slow motions combined with soft songs are something that could really work if the setup is that enticing. But the lack of conviction in staging some of the huge set pieces makes the final act of the movie a tiring, unending fight. When one of the characters is saying all those dialogues while driving with a bullet in his stomach, the lack of logic just bothers you too much. Swapnil S. Sonawane’s cinematography opts for various styles according to the emotion of the character, and apart from Alia Bhatt’s performance, that was the only thing that worked in favor of this movie.

Alia Bhatt is solid in being Satya, and it is a character that demands subtlety to portray irreverence. For a larger chunk of the film, she is this very strong woman who is extremely focused even when he gets the news that her brother is in trouble. Alia has done a tremendous job of keeping the character in a very believable zone. The Archies fame Vedang Raina plays the part of Ankur, and he was able to portray the frustrations and hopelessness of the character convincingly. Manoj Pahwa gets to play this retired gangster with all his typical witty elements, and another major role was played by Rahul Ravindran.

Rather than becoming an action film built on a solid emotional platform, Jigra manages to become only a melodramatic burnout. You would find yourself waiting for the movie to shift the gears, but it takes an awful lot of time for that, and the design of the action just doesn’t have the juice in it to bring back the lost interest.