Ram Setu: Bridge over scrambled waters

The good news first. Ram Setu is better than Akshay Kumar’s Bachchhan Paandey and Samrat Prithviraj. But still not good enough to come anywhere close to being the actor’s comeback vehicle. The trouble is, Akshay Kumar has stopped making any effort. His dedication to his character of an atheist turned believer in Ram Setu is restricted to his frizzy Kangana Ranaut hair and Gandhian spectacles which are supposed to lend credibility to his archaeologist’s character. This archaeologist needed to dig deeper. Beyond the superficialities, Akshay’s personality gives away nothing about a man who sets off on a mission to prove that the Ram Setu was not constructed by Lord Rama but ends up proving just the opposite. Director Abhishek Sharma has in the past given us some interesting cinema especially Tere Bin Laden and Parmanu which were honest to their genres. In Ram Setu, Sharma starts by telling an interesting story of a man’s journey from a non-believer to a man of faith. In negotiating this sprawling arc in the plot, Sharma leans heavily into the Hindutva ideology, yanking the story almost forcibly deeper and deeper into mythology rather than the ideology, far removed from the rational stance it assumes initially.

By bullying the plot into a saffron submission, Ram Setu does not necessarily open itself to cynical questioning. The reading of the film as pro-establishment propaganda is not only completely and fashionably fallacious, it is also part of the leftwings’ efforts to ridicule and discredit any cinema that takes a pro-Hindutva stance. It is not the mythological propensity that erodes this film’s credibility. It is the inability to find a sturdy core, it’s dithering ideology that disfranchises the film’s unabashed political prattle. There is so much that Ram Setu could have said about the ongoing debate on Faith versus Blind Faith. Instead, the narrative takes off on an Indiana Jones adventure with heroes dangling from choppers and villainous politicians determined to disprove the Rama Setu’s religious relevance so as to demolish the ancient bridge. Whether it is 7,000 years or 7,00 years old, why must the bridge be demolished? Who says it had to be brought down? For the sake of a thriller plot, why make up such absurd theories? More importantly, why must the existence of any monument be either religiously sanctioned or open to constant questioning? Why must a monument be anointed to be preserved? Akshay Kumar looks too bored to answer these questions. His performance is listless and uninvolved. Telugu actor Satyadev playing a modern-day Hanuman, steals the show, perhaps for his freshness of presence in Hindi cinema. The rest of the cast looks bored and detached. The women hardly have a voice in this conversation of creed and greed. Nushrratt Bharuccha as the archaeologist-hero’s wife is initially shown to be smarter than her husband. To make up for her unusual intelligence she later makes a really dumb mistake. Jacqueline Fernandez get to hang around Akshay as they wade their weary way through a maze of mythological mindblowers, none more so than the underwater sequences where Akshay Kumar in robotic underwater gear, cruises the ocean looking for ancient relics that could turn the fortunes of the troubled bridge over shallow waters, which is exactly what this film is. Who says the Ram Setu is endangered by devious scientific minds? By bringing it into the middle of a conspiracy theory, the makers have converted the monument into a timidly hatched formula for success. 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. Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News ,  India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook ,  Twitter  and  Instagram .