If you look at a movie like John Wick, there is a scene that doesn’t feature John Wick, and the antagonist gives his son, who made a mess of the situation, a history lesson about Baba Yaga. It was fascinating that the scene, which gave foundation to an entire franchise that sort of redefined violent action, had very minimal action. This scene is extremely integral to that movie. Because, without that, it would feel like a generic action movie where we know the hero’s motive. Subedaar, the new Amazon Prime Video original, co-written and directed by Suresh Triveni, the man who made the delightful Tumhari Sulu, is an attempt to tap into the space of something like a John Wick. While the stylistic preferences make us interested in the narrative choices of the movie, the film goes on and on in this “about to explode” kind of tone, and what you ultimately get is a dull ending.
Retired Subedaar Arjun Maurya comes back to his hometown in Madhya Pradesh. He had lost his wife, and that has impacted his equation with his daughter Shyama. The decision to take up the job of being a personal bodyguard to a local mafia don, Prince, did not go well for Arjun, as the lack of respect didn’t work for him. How his fallout with this guy escalates into something huge is what we see in Subedaar.
The template is very familiar. There is that spoiled brat mafia leader who disrespects a man of discipline. His fragile ego decides to push the restrained hero to the edge, and once the guy crosses the limit, the hero unleashes hell on him. And just like John Wick, there are experienced people trying to put sense into the brain of the bad guy. It is a very generic plot, and that is perhaps the reason they pretty much exposed everything in the movie’s trailer. On a craft level, Suresh Triveni is trying to make the staging of scenes much more raw and intimidating. And there are these transitions in edit where a vertical pan shows us what really happened.
These visual choices in narrating the buildup towards the obvious showdown create a sense of excitement in the first hour of the movie. But the problem with the writing is that you are sort of aware of the payoffs that will happen at a later stage in this movie, almost at the midpoint. I actually liked the way they set up these two tracks featuring the father and daughter, where they both are secretly dealing with a mess in their own capacity, and how that intertwines into a larger confusion. But after a point, the film depends heavily on the emotional baggage of these characters. In something like a John Wick, we don’t go to visual flashbacks, yet we would understand the impact of his wife’s character. Here, despite showing Mr. Maurya’s wife and revealing what transpired between him and his daughter, you are not emotionally hooked to the content. The character development of the bad folks was really underwhelming.
Anil Kapoor plays the title character with a sexy restraint in his demeanor. The typical grace one would associate with an army man is definitely there, and the vulnerable bits of the character are not that loud, and he was able to carry it believably on screen. Radhika Madan, as the daughter, plays that feisty character convincingly on screen. Paresh Rawal’s son Aditya Rawal plays the role of the delusional don Prince Bhaiyya. The character never felt like an intimidating figure, and if that was a creative choice, I must say he has done a good job. One could easily see Mona Singh doing the acting in her portrayal of Babli Didi. Saurabh Shukla, as the confidant of Maurya, was impressive with his typical sense of humor. Panchayat fame Faizal Malik gets a cosmetic upgrade through this character named Softy Bhaiyya.
Towards the end of the movie, there is this buildup towards something massive that only the hero and his friend know. But the experience of watching movies can make almost anyone predict what that could be. And by verbally explaining the setup, Subedaar just shreds whatever swagger it accumulated till that point. And it also made me realize how good a director Nelson (Jailer) is in staging a pivotal scene. The very last scene of the movie almost felt like a scene they added after the edit, since the initial climax fell flat.
