Squad

Usually, when star kids in Bollywood decide to make their debut, they opt for some remake to play it safe on the content side. But actor Danny Denzongpa’s son Rinzing Denzongpa chose to opt for original content to mark his debut, and sadly for the viewers, the film is a celebration of mediocrity. Squad, the new Zee5-original starring Rinzing as Bhim, starts off making you do the facepalm, and by the time it ends, you will be laughing out loud seeing the spoofy side of it. With the right-wing propaganda getting projected without any sort of subtlety, this wannabe Uri is a mess in all aspects.

Squad is basically about a team in the Indian Special Forces. After an operation in P.O.K, the leader of the squad Bhim was unable to save a child, and that thought haunted him and made him quit the force. 3 years later, the Indian government finds itself in a difficult situation when a child, the granddaughter of a prominent scientist, gets abducted. So, top official Nandini Rajput has a really short window to assemble a team and handle the mission. What happens in that mission is the story of Squad.

One criticism that Uri faced was that it was rooting for that hyper-nationalistic, jingoistic tone of the current right-wing. Well, Adithya Dhar’s film was technically solid, and to an extent, it conceived the emotions perfectly. But in Squad, they are just bombarding you with the New India attitude. Every time Rinzing is fighting on screen, some jingoistic song will be playing in the backdrop. You will just feel like telling director Nilesh Sahay to calm down. The predictability of the film is as awful as the acting. The antagonist here is played by Mohan Kapoor, and from the moment his character is on the screen, you know what he is going to do. As per the movie, India has already developed cyborgs to do war, a technology that has made other countries envy us.

In one scene, when one of the squad members informs that something has gone wrong, one of them rhetorically says, “what.” And our leading lady responds to that “what” by saying, “now it’s not the time for questions.” I really hope no one in the Special Forces will end up seeing this film. Because in his attempt to portray them as heroes, Nilesh Sahay just made them laughing stocks. The dialogues offer you humor in the most surprising ways possible, and love songs are popping out of nowhere. The cinematography is ordinary, and the editing is a mess. The cuts you see on the fight sequences can make even the editor of Jason Bourne movies angry.

Rinzing Denzongpa has only one expression throughout the film. It was perfectly in sync with the overall quality of the writing of this film. At least he could have done something to bring swagger into his walk. There are two sequences in the movie where Sahay tries to give a heroic image to Rinzing by making him walk in slow-motion as explosions happen around him. But in both scenes, all I could see was a soldier with a brooding face who perhaps lost his hearing in one of the blasts. Malvika Raaj is the mandatory beautiful heroine for the songs whose hair and makeup aren’t affected by bomb blasts. Pooja Batra is a bit unbearable, mainly because of the crap dialogues written for her character. Mohan Kapoor’s Abhay Bhatnagar is a hilariously terrible villain.

The movie’s climax has Bhim going on a final mission to get the girl. Before takeoff, he receives a letter from a higher authority. Later we see Bhim’s chief Nandini Rajput telling someone over the phone that Bhim has got your instructions. And in the last bit, we realize that the guy who gave the instructions to Bhim through that letter was the PM. Well, it seems like the cloud cover story has got some buyers, and at moments like these, you don’t really know whether to cringe or laugh.