An Action Hero: An insanely, irreverent take on the hate Bollywood campaign

Myth : Bollywood killed Sushant Singh Rajput . Reality: Bollywood is too self-centred to  bother with metaphysical homicides. In debutant director Anirudh Iyer’s cheekily self-parodical An Action Hero , Ayushmann Khurrana plays Maanav a self-obsessed star who lands up in Haryana for a shooting.

When he can’t get angry for an action sequence Maanav’s business manager (Harsh Chhaya, playing a psychologically sound character after a long time) reminds Maanav that the delivery of his new car is delayed. Of course, Maanav’s car is not delayed.  Who would dare to offend a superstar, that too an action hero? Maanav takes off for a spin. In a deftly written progression of incidents, he  ends up killing a local  local  goon. Now the  goon’s  inconsolably angry brother Bhoora played by the redoubtable Jaideep Ahlawat , is after Maanav’s blood.

Set  mostly in London and its  suburbs, An Action Hero is crazy ride into fights, cameras and action. The world of conflict  between screen hero and his nemesis that  writer Neeraj Yadav has constructed in Britain is brittle but supple and sinewy. The storytelling is muscular, robust and very trendily face-offish.

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I  wish  director  Anirudh Iyer, so  assured when  his two  main characters are in the  frame,  would have avoided so many  incidental  character. What was  the  need  for that  guest appearance by Akshay  Kumar whom Maanav meets on a flight while fleeing to  Britain?  He adds nothing to the  drama. Or the  item song by  Malaika Arora which makes a hash of the Nazia Hassan  club classic Aap jaisa Koi Meri Zindagi Mein Aaye.

The superimpositions are enormously annoying. But the action scenes, especially a chase in the streets and on the rooftops of London, are class acts. If only the narrative stuck to the two-handler plot instead of spreading it out into shapes that are probably amusing to those designing the frames but not to the onlookers.

There are many WTF episodes in An Action Hero. Khurrana is in perfect sync with his character’s sinking fortunes in a world determined to hate Bollywood actors for imagined crimes.

This is where the real fun kicks. Loud, boorish TRP-famished television anchors demonizing Bollywood and Maanav are unleashed . One of then even does the infamous ‘Drugs Do Drugs Do’ theatrics on camera  just the way our loudest news anchor had done.

As a critique on Bollywood critics, An Action Hero has a sizeable bandwidth which it uses to advantage. Thereafter, the entire #HateBollywood campaign is turned on its head. Finally, Maanav gets a hero’s homecoming in Mumbai, crimes forgotten . I am not too sure Maanav understands why. Defeated by its own yearning to deconstruct the  hate campaign against Bollywood this  sporadically engaging film falls prey to a critical contradiction about its  intentions.

Still,  this is fun while it lasts. Khurrana  and Ahlawat play off against one another in an ongoing, if somewhat inconsistent cat-and-mouse again. One lengthy  hand-to-hand combat between the two in a cabin in London goes on and on as though waiting for the screenwriter to think of the next move.

The film works best when not thinking too much about logic. This may not be the best approach in a film that celebrates the spirit of screen heroism in a crisis that is real. At least for the screen hero.

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based journalist. He has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.