Drishyam 2 shows us how a remake should be done

It takes a huge amount of guts and enterprising spirit for a Hindi actor to enter into the mighty Mohanlal’s Malayalam zone, since his fans seem to think no one can improve on what he has done, especially when it comes to the Drishyam franchise which has acquired a cult status since its inception in 2015. Even the mighty Kamal Haasan was compared poorly to Mohanlal when he tried Drishyam in Tamil.

But Ajay Devgn — God bless his enterprising spirit—has done it, not once but twice. _Drishyam_ which came in 2015 stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the original. Now for the sequel: does it hold up sturdily in comparison with the original?

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The purists, those who think all remakes are to be frowned at, no matter what their true calibre, may frown at _Drishyam 2_ which is like going without deliberation or reasonable exploration into a pavlovian aversion to the remake.

But the truth is Drishyam 2 works. Both as a remake and as a stand-alone enterprise. Thanks to the ever-dependable Devgn, who comes up with one of his most languorously lucid performances in recent times. He portrays Vijay Salgoankar as a husband and father who thinks far ahead of his adversaries but lets them think otherwise.

Someone in the course of the film says, “Salgaonkar has a very intelligent mind. But like many intelligent people, he presumes the rest of the world to be stupid.”

I don’t think that’s a correct reading of this protagonist’s mind. Vijay Salgaonkar, as played by Devgn, is a man who wants to protect his family after a horrible crime of self-defence. If in the first film he was shown to be super-smart while covering all his bases, in the sequel his lunges at familial fortification verge on genius.

“Audiences don’t like their hero going to jail at the end,” Vijay a shrewd film producer, comments at the initial stages when trouble seems a remote possibility. As the plot spirals into a nightmarish cul de sac, director Abhishek Pathak brings in a sense of dramatic urgency that would border on a burlesque of a heinous crime were it not for the restraint that we see in the storytelling.

The characters from the original are denuded of sharp edges, sometimes leaving them way too blunted. The husband and wife couple who are Salgaonkars’ troubled neighbours are far more sharply projected in the original Malayalam film, perhaps because they were played by far better actors Anjali Nair and Sumesh Chandran in the Malayalam original. In Hindi, Neha Joshi and Siddharth Bodke just pass muster; maybe it’s the sketchy writing of their rather important roles in the remake.

Barring Devgn, the actors in Hindi come across as weakly cast, none more so than Akshaye Khanna whose endless grimacing as the Inspector General comes nowhere close to the steely investigative impulses of Murali Gopi in the original.

But the biggest disappointment is Tabu. As the vendetta-fuelled grieving mother of a murdered son, there is so much that she could have done with her part in the sequel. Instead, she stands smugly removed from the tragedy, as if the actor isn’t really empathetic with her character.

As for Devgn, does he stand up ably to Mohanlal in the original? I would say, much more than expected. His portrait of a man determined to protect his family at any cost is at once powerful vulnerable connectible. He is the truest superhero without the cape. And lets his imagination do all the flying when the planet, his family, is threatened Not all his moves and manoeuvres to outsmart the law are convincing. But Devgan’s Salagaokar never stops distrusting anyone. Sometimes, in order to protect your dear ones, you have to protect them from themselves.

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based film critic who has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. He tweets at @SubhashK_Jha.

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