Lakadbaggha movie review: Anshuman Jha and Ridhi Dogra starrer is a treat for action & dog lovers

Canine vigilantism is not a concept we have seen being explored in Indian cinema. It takes an actor and producer of Anshuman Jha’s guts to get into an untried territory with nothing to lose except his blood sweat and tears.

In this case, he literally jumps into fights that are not in the safe zone at all. Bones get cracked, blood spills on the frames. The squeamish may not be comfortable with the visuals. The stylish stunts are staged with a choreographic passion and staged in locations and situations where virtuosity is not the crux. Survival is.

I have seen Anshuman Jha do plenty of unorthodox roles including his last sojourn into serendipity, titled Akele Hum Akele Tum where he played a gay man on a road trip with a lesbian. This actor does like to bark up the rugged tree. The bark turns into a bite in the weirdly titled Lakadbaggha which we are told, means a hyena. One of those howling creatures does show up in the course of the storytelling. But this is really not a film about hyenas.

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Jha, doing his first fiercely belligerent role, plays Arjun, an extreme canine lover who is not content just feeding stray dogs. He fights bloodied battles with canine tormentors, sending them to their graves with a fighter’s panache that is proof of his fighter’s spirit. The action scenes are derived from Israeli martial arts known as Krav-Maga.

Jha uses the kicks crunches and grunts to spotlight the protective impulse: if you don’t kick the dog, I won’t kick you. The strong message on sensitivity towards dogs is never over-underlined. The plot makes organic space for a tender understated romance between the canine vigilante and a rather comely cop Akshara D’Souza, who is assigned to ferret out the dog vigilante.

There is a certain jaunty aura about the duo’s encounters. I especially liked their aggressive interaction in a gym where Ridhi Dogra gives Anshuman Jha as good as it gets. While Anshuman is suitably vulnerable and bellicose giving to the action scenes all he has got, and then some more, Ridhi Dogra is a natural-born camera seductress, bringing both a vivacity and vitality to her part. I wonder why we don’t see more of her on screen.

That the villain turns out to be the heroine’s blood brother is like an unshaven bearded stranger in a banquet room filled with suave guests. The villain Aryan played by Paresh Pahuja wears a cloak of causticity throughout, as though he knows at the end he must die a sticky death.

There is also an intriguing moll played by a North Eastern kickboxer-cop Eksha Kerung who lets her kicks do all the talking. She is a knock-out.

All of these characters don’t quite fit in.  But they never seem out of place as they are spun into a web of action-induced propensities, better left to fight rather than fret. The film is shot in the bylanes of Kolkata and the French cinematographer Jean Mark Selva’s eye for defining details is unerring. The other highlight is the sparingly used background score by Simon Fransquet while the stunts and action as choreographed by Ketcha Khampaede & Force One are simply heart-in-the-mouth and guts-in-the-hand stuff.

Lakadbaggha is a cannily constructed collage of canine-centric fist explosions. But be warned: you may not want to eat biryani for the rest of your life.

Lakadbaggha is releasing on 13 January

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based journalist. He has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out.

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