Jawaan movie review: Sai Dharam Tej-starrer has thrills aplenty — and mundane subplots

BVS Ravi’s Jawaan, starring Sai Dharam Tej and Prasanna, suffers from a Yin-Yang problem, which is pretty similar to the characterisations of its two lead actors. In the film, Jai (Sai Dharam Tej) and Keshav (Prasanna) are childhood buddies, who grow up with different ideologies and eventually, they find themselves in the opposite side of the spectrum. While Jai wants to save his country, Keshav wants to destroy it. Jai and Keshav are like water and sand - you can write a million things on the beach, but once it’s hit by a wave, everything is back to square one. After watching the film, I couldn’t help but think about how the film follows a similar pattern and that too quite consistently. For every good thing it does, the film’s narrative ruins the deck of cards that writer and director BVS Ravi spends ample time on. It also made me wonder if the biggest nemesis of the film was the notion that it has to be accessible to everyone, and thus we have a sloppily written romantic track which seems terribly out of place in an otherwise interesting plot.

The introduction scene of Jai was perhaps the most surprising part of the film. We are told that Jai is an RSS Karyakarta, who aspires to work at DRDO, and it’s here that we first begin to see Jai making it evident that he’ll put nation first before his own family or his life. I haven’t come across any film in Telugu, at least, where its lead protagonist is so forthright about his belief system; however, much like rest of the film, this is brushed off and rarely resurfaces in the subsequent scenes. He still puts nation first but the concept of Jai being an RSS member is left dangling without a closure. In a backstory, we see that Jai is the sort of kid who finds inspiration in the sacrifices made by freedom fighters like Bhagat Singh, and he grows up to be a confident young man who’ll stand by what he believes in. On the other hand, Keshav (Prasanna) begins his journey as a selfish and greedy kid, and when he grows up, his greed for money blinds him. One day, Keshav accepts a deal worth Rs 500 crores to commit the biggest crime of his life; however, everything changes when Jai gets involved. The rest of the plot is about what happens when these childhood friends turn arch rivals. 

In a cinematic universe, Jawaan might very well be a distant cousin of Dhruva and PSV Garuda Vega; however, it also does a lot of things that its cousins avoided carefully. It’s not impervious to the temptations of a commercial cinema, where the life of a male protagonist has no meaning if he doesn’t have a love story. So, Jai meets Bhargavi (Mehreen Pirzada) one day and she bullies him into letting her ride his bike while it rains. His awkward conversation with Bhargavi is in stark contrast with what he does in rest of the story, and at some point you realise — although we force ourselves to believe that he’s trying to insulate her from whatever is happening in his life — the romantic track is also the film’s biggest undoing. It’s the inevitable speed breaker on a smooth road, and the songs are more like check posts which never let you enjoy the thrill of watching the film unfold at breakneck speed. 

And just when you are about to write off the film, BVS Ravi throws another interesting segment involving Jai trying to track down how seemingly unrelated events have a common connection, and how he uses social media to bring everyone’s attention on to a problem. But this doesn’t last too long either, because Monsieur Jai has to meet his bae, Mademoiselle Bhargavi at Richmond Tomb, which has a French-Hyderabad connection, although it’s just dubbed as a ‘French Class’. Their love couldn’t be more platonic and at times, it feels like Jai is in a rush to go back to solving a bigger mystery, which is true. Among all the actors, it’s Mehreen who gets the raw deal of having to appear on screen to remind people that there’s some light in an otherwise dark and intense film, and also to satiate the demands of a commercial film. Sai Dharam Tej delivers a good performance as a honest man who’ll do anything for his country; however, his awkwardness is quite evident in the film’s romantic scenes.

Prasanna does a fine job as a suit-boot villain, and the way cinematographer KV Guhan has played with the lighting and shadows in the film, sometimes it makes it difficult to read Prasanna’s mind, and that’s a good thing. We know what his intentions are, but surprisingly, he doesn’t mind getting his hands dirty and get down to business when all his plans fail. Jawaan turns this rivalry between the two primary characters into a mind-game, just like what we have seen in Dhruva. The two films might share the same DNA, but Prasanna’s Keshav is no Aravind Swamy’s Siddharth Abhimanyu. After all these years of climbing up the ladder in the crime world, one might want to believe that Keshav’s sophistication would have resulted in new ideologies about greed; however, he’s still the old-fashioned villain who never wins when he faces a hero. 

BVS Ravi toys with several other interesting ideas, like using WhatsApp as a form of citizen activism, and justifies the theme of every youngster being a soldier of the country but some of these good intentions are lost as the narrative jumps from one twist to another. And before we know it, everyone in the film has the look on their face, “Why me? When will this end?”. They might be thinking about the crisis in the film, but the act of watching the film is equated, although unconsciously, to the idea of serving the nation because that’s what soldiers do. There’s also a rousing background score by Thaman which is hard to shake off in scene after scene, at times loud enough to muffle your own stream of thoughts while watching Jawaan race against time to save the country and also wondering, when will this film end.  It left me with conflicting thoughts. For every good ounce of thrills it provides, Jawaan is also weighed down by its rather mundane and awkward subplots.