Rashtra Kavach Om Review: Aditya Roy Kapur starrer is another typical Bollywood actioner with no originality

A young Om, suffering from childhood trauma, is adopted by his army officer uncle Jai Rathod ( Ashutosh Rana). Om ( Aditya Roy Kapur) grows up to be an incomparable paramilitary commando, one who dives off a plane and lands right onto a battleship where he single-handedly fights off some mean men. For some reason, this covert operation has been assigned to only one soldier. You soon realise that logic is in short supply in this script.

Anyway, outnumbered and outwitted, Om gets shot in the head. A few months later, he is recuperating in a safe house under the watchful care of agent Kavya ( Sanjana Sanghi). But just as Om regains conscience, suddenly the safe house proves to be unsafe. Om has lost his recent memory but he has combat-related motor memory and also vividly recalls the incident when, as a young boy, he was separated from his scientist father Dev ( Jackie Shroff). A missing Dev has since been branded a national traitor.

As Om regains his original strength, he is reunited with his special forces team including Kavya and tech whiz Rohit ( Vicky Arora) and sent on a mission to Armenia to retrieve the Kavach, a game-changing weapon that’s been stolen from the Indian government.

Adding in a human element, there’s the story of a mother (Prachee Shah Pandya) who is grieving her lost sons. Adding unintended comedy is a politician stomping around her office, fuming over botched missions by the intelligence department under the command of Murthy ( Prakash Raj). At times Raj and Rana appear to be just sharing a quiet joke on the side as they chomp on this script, switching between serious, sensitive and comic book villainy. The one deliberate attempt at humour is a tea-drinking Gujarati doctor who examines Om and whose expert prognosis is ‘motor memory’.

Sanghi’s Kavya could have had a more pivotal role, but after the initial bedside care and one combat scene, she’s pushed to the sidelines with a hint of a brewing romance with Om.

In writers Raj Saluja and Niket Pandey’s story, the twists come faster than Kapur’s punches. The action is highly stylised with a reliance on wirework and high-speed shots and while Kapur gets many moments to smoulder and look troubled, he only has a couple of scenes where he can bite into the material.

One of the most impressive things about this Kapil Verma directed action drama is Aditya Roy Kapur’s evenly bronzed and chiselled body. Following a pattern of recent Bollywood action films, here is another one where the hero hedges his bets on reinvention and the makers hedge their bets on action pieces centred on a beefed-up action hero. Everyone seems to have forgotten about the need for an original, cohesive and judicious script.

Rashtra Kavach Om is playing in cinemas.

Udita Jhunjhunwala is a writer, film critic, and festival programmer.

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