Jungle Cry movie review: Abhay Deol’s sincere sports film is still an aimless Jhund

Language: Hindi and English Nothing gives away a film’s lack of self-belief, more than its reliance on a voice-over (VO). Widely considered as the last, laziest crutch employed by a screenwriter/director/editor when the written scene or blocked footage are far from having the intended effect, I can almost hear a filmmaker’s mournful tsk when they cut to an explanatory VO, filling in the blanks and telling the audience what to feel. In Sagar Ballary’s Jungle Cry, streaming on Lionsgate Play, the screenplay cuts to the film’s characters speaking to us in documentary-styled clips, where nothing is left to chance by the film’s writers (Dipankar Giri, Diane Charles and Shubhodeep Pal). Whatever the characters aren’t able to communicate through acting, they emphasise in their chaste Hindi VOs. (For eg: “main bilkul ghabra gaya tha uss din…) It’s a choice that was also employed by Aaron Sorkin in his last venture – Being The Ricardos, where actors played the older version of characters to fill people in on the context behind the making of one of America’s most-watched television sitcoms of all time – I Love Lucy. While Sorkin uses the different POVs to allow his patented style of Jungle Cry, also based on the rather incredible real-life story of 13 tribal kids picking up a rugby ball merely four months before a Junior Rugby World Cup championship that took place in London in 2011, uses it less effectively.

Rudra Jena – Abhay Deol just taking on an Oriya name and playing himself like he has been doing for nearly a decade – is a football coach at the Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences (KISS), a private institute that helps harness the tribal kids’ potential through life’s great equaliser – sport. Backed by Dr Achyutha Samanta (played by Atul Kumar – Hindi cinema and OTT platforms’ resident slippery, rude uncle) the kids are presented with an opportunity to participate in a Junior Rugby World cup. It’s an opportunity that simply parachutes in their life with the help of an English character called Paul Walsh (played by Stewart Wright) – shown to be a typical patronising foreigner, who oversells his “amazement” at the natural dexterity of the local kids, who have never picked up a rugby ball ever in their life. The opening scene sees a few kids unknowingly doing the rugby routine with a jar of marbles, trying to escape their local bullies. Granted that the film is also based on a real-life incident, and has been lying in the cans for three years, and yet it’s hard to forget how the film surfaced only a few months after Nagraj Manjule’s _Jhund_ , also based on a real-life figure who rounded up a bunch of impoverished kids and offered them a ‘way out’ through sport. It’s a whole sub-genre in world cinema, and there’s only so much one can do to build the stakes in an underdog sports drama. And yet, like Jhund and even last year’s Sarpatta Parambarai showed that it was possible to revive a genre if the maker delved into the specificity of its setting.

Ballary, largely a hit-and-miss director, who made his debut with the adequate _Bheja Fry_ (2007), brings an outsider gaze to the lives of these children – who often escape challenging domestic situations.

There’s a general-ness in the way he depicts the boys as a part of a monolith, instead of imbuing them with specific traits and personalities like Manjule does in the first half-hour of Jhund.

Deol, who last played a character outside his comfort zone in Shanghai (2012), is… familiar. I’m not saying that all parts need a local dialect’s affliction in the way he speaks, but at this point it would also be great if Deol does literally anything to differentiate his last performance from his preceding performances in terms of physicality, in terms of speech or even in looks. It’s hard to tell one Abhay Deol performance from another in the last decade. A showcase for Dr Samantha – a real-life educationist and philanthropist – the film barely dips its toes into his life. Atul Kumar, a competent actor in his own right, hits the broad notes of Samantha’s generosity and selflessness with ease. But never do we see either Rudra or Dr Samantha as just… people. They’re always self-serious and ‘in character’, hardly allowing them any memorable humour. They’re always focused (like the film) on the cause. It’s all the tired tropes from sports dramas all over again – the pre-interval make-or-break match, where our team seems to be losing in the first half, only to make a comeback in the second. It’s all so predictable at this point that I found myself yawning through most of it, even tempted to forward. Unlike Manjule’s film which slams the breaks in the latter half of the film, everything happens very smoothly and efficiently in Jungle Cry. Passports, visas appear out of thin air, money is arranged through one stray mention of a land being mortgaged to raise money for the world cup. It all seems to happen with the convenience of a Bollywood screenwriter’s pen.

All this means that a significant onus of the film’s merit falls on the actual on-field visuals, which aren’t half bad. The sequences are choreographed rather well, and there isn’t too many of the agonising slo-mo moments to build the stakes of a scene. Ballary seems proficient in the way he shoots the sequences, giving us a picture of the actual ground and how a play is orchestrated. However, there also isn’t particularly novel about the arc of the team or the matches. Anyone who has seen Chak De! Knows how it works, right? How does one team play so terribly in one game, and then magically improve in the next? There seem to be missing pieces of the puzzle, which the makers seem to have sacrificed in favour of brevity and length. There’s also an unnecessary subplot about Rudra’s past traumas of a disappointed parent, and another Emily Shah as the team’s physio, Roshni – who seems to be working out of her own demons of a dead brother and estranged mother, which don’t have seem to be integrated well into the overall narrative. The real-life story behind Jungle Cry is ripe for a film adaptation, but despite the best intentions of Ballary’s film, it turns the fable almost ineffectual. This should have been a much better movie, only if the makers showed a little more courage to own the sports movie cliches, something Manjule did with assurance and zany energy, without any fear of upsetting audience expectation. Jungle Cry is a safe cause-and-effect equation adapted into a feature-length film. Jungle Cry is currently streaming on Lionsgate Play Rating: * 1/2

Tatsam Mukherjee has been working as a film journalist since 2016. He is based out of Delhi NCR. Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News ,  India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.