Ram Setu movie review: A Hindutva project pretending to be scientific, with aspirations to being a Baahubali

Language: Hindi 

There was an age when a film featuring the man protagonist romancing a pretty young woman, dancing, raging against injustice and single-handedly fighting off large groups of villains was deemed the perfect showcase for the talents of an aspiring Bollywood star of the male gender. These, after all, were the attributes required of a conventional Hindi film hero. Akshay Kumar has been there, done that, and reaped massive box-office dividends in the bargain. He is now aiming at a new-age stardom among a recently delineated constituency. Enter: _Ram Setu_, a film that gives his character the opportunity to, among other things, be devoted to a pretty wife played by an actor nearly two decades younger than he is (Nushrratt Bharuccha), gently taunt a Pakistani but also be benevolent towards Pakistan and Afghanistan, engage in fisticuffs in a helicopter, convert an enemy into an ally with his selflessness, and single-handedly fight off a villainous government colluding with a corporation to undermine Hinduism.

Director Abhishek Sharma’s Ram Setu stars Akshay as an archaeologist, Dr Aryan Kulshrestha, who proudly tomtoms his atheism to the press. The year is 2007. Around this time, the evil shipping magnate Indrakanth (Nasser) finds a project stalled by religious devotees. Indrakanth needs a portion to be shaved off the Ram Setu a.k.a. Adam’s Bridge a.k.a. Ram’s Bridge – a natural formation running between Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka – so as to shorten the route to be taken by one of his fuel-guzzling ships. He is close to the government of the day (guess which one!), so the only barrier in his path are the faithful.

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Aryan is roped in to prove that Ram Setu pre-dates Lord Ram and therefore could not possibly have been built by the Hindu deity. The hero’s well-known atheism is useful for the industrialist here, because the former’s findings are likely to be accepted as an objective opinion rather than a view coloured by religious beliefs. Atheism, rationalism and science are also the film’s cover to pretend that it is being logical.

Since this is an Akshay Kumar project made in an era when Bollywood, like him, has been openly pandering to majoritarian elements in the audience and to the present government, it is easy to predict what conclusions Aryan arrives at with the help of ‘science’. There is no credible progression in the script from the Aryan who initially decried religion to the Aryan who later casually blurs the distinction between mythology, literature and history, to make arguments that are nothing but a slightly polished, insidious version of the propaganda floating around on WhatsApp and Twitter these days. Writer-director Abhishek Sharma (Tere Bin Laden, The Shaukeens, Tere Bin Laden: Dead or Alive) who smartly obfuscates the difference between fact and fiction throughout, does not strain himself to explain Aryan’s metamorphosis.

Instead we get a 360-degree effort at drawing cheers from the lowest common denominator. So, this is a saga of the victimisation of Hindus in which Ayodhya is stressed as a prime example. Aryan describes Delhi’s Qutb Minar– a historical monument built by a Muslim dynasty – as a symbol of Bharat’s defeat. The illogical script’s idea of intelligence and depth is to christen its characters after prominent figures in Hindu mythology. Pravessh Rana plays Bali, while another important player in the script bears one of Hanuman’s various names. Towering over all of them of course is the leading man with his Brahmin moniker.

Akshay tries to look convincing as a scientist by embracing a messy, curly, salt ‘n’ pepper hairdo and largely deadpanning his way through the role.

Jacqueline Fernandez is given little to do beyond be attractive in navel-revealing attire in the most dire circumstances. As a Goan Christian woman, she also amounts to a token nod to diversity among Ram Setu’s troupe of good souls saving Hinduism.

Nushrratt Bharuccha plays Aryan’s wife, Professor Gayatri Kulshrestha, who makes tea on demand for him from the beginning to the end of Ram Setu, and is the voice of the bhakt written to sound calm and well reasoned even as she muddles issues. The actor is not bad at her job.

The only artiste who stands out in the cast though is the charismatic Telugu actor Satya Dev. He is in the role of Aryan’s lively Sri Lankan associate whose true identity is revealed in one of the film’s silliest moments that underlines the minuscule effort made in the script to explain how Aryan went from rationalist to irrational.

Opportunistic politics apart, Ram Setu is surprisingly flat for a film dealing with potentially explosive material. The storytelling is limp. Technically too it is wanting. The dubbing, for one, is uneven.

Ram Setu has been made on a lavish scale. While it is sometimes visually gigantic, it is also mostly bland and on occasion, tacky. The underwater scenes in Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, for instance, were grand and meditative whereas the under-sea portions here are adequate at best. In a blatantly wannabe-Baahubali scene in Ram Setu, Aryan emerges from the sea carrying a big stone, an image that might have been done better even by a Photoshop amateur asked to plant a man in the middle of a photograph of a water body.

Ram Setu is significant only because of the dangers posed by painstakingly disguised propagandist cinema, especially in the current socio-political climate. If not for that, this is just another boring Akshay Kumar film of the many that have been churned out by Bollywood in recent years. Raksha Bandhan, Cuttputlli, now this. Yawn!

Rating: 1 (out of 5 stars) 

This review was first published in October 2022 when Ram Setu was released in theatres. The film is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.

Anna M.M. Vetticad is an award-winning journalist and author of The Adventures of an Intrepid Film Critic. She specialises in the intersection of cinema with feminist and other socio-political concerns. Twitter: @annavetticad, Instagram: @annammvetticad, Facebook: AnnaMMVetticadOfficial

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