Why Aditya Roy Kapur's rippling muscles couldn’t save Rashtra Kavach Om

As any action-movie diehard will tell you, super-soldiers plus impaired memory equals large-scale mayhem. This basic premise is exploited, most famously, by the Jason Bourne movies. But I’m also thinking of much more recent inventions like Bucky Barnes/The Winter Soldier from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, a ‘brainwashed’ soldier-turned-assassin with hundreds of kill missions around the world. Or Vin Diesel in the movie Bloodshot, which stretched this premise to breaking point — we were shown multiple versions of the same ‘origin story’ sequence for his character, because the narrator is just that unreliable, so to speak.

On paper, therefore, c’s memory-impaired super-soldier Om (the protagonist of Kapil Verma’s Rashtra Kavach Om) could have been a halfway decent leading man. When we first meet Om, he’s at the receiving end of a botched mission, left for half-dead and suffering acute memory loss. What follows next is predictable — Om struggles to piece together the events of his (recent) past and uncover the identity of a mole among his people, with a little help from Sanjana Sanghi’s Kavya, who’s the only female soldier-spy on display here (on either side).

The basic problem with Rashtra Kavach Om is that its writing is too threadbare to handle even this fairly broad premise. All they really had to do was stitch together enough action set pieces with a clearly ripped Kapur (whose physical transformation is admittedly impressive). But the makers fail at this rudimentary screenwriting duty. The story lurches forward and backwards in time with little rhyme or reason. Characters flit in and out of the action, delivering bland, vague-sounding hokum about ‘rashtra’ and ‘action’ and suchlike. As a result, actors like Prakash Raj and Ashutosh Rana are utterly wasted; the latter in particular visibly laboring through proceedings. Hell, his character barely changes demeanor when Om (his son) comes out of a coma—probably reflects the actor’s rapidly dipping interest levels.

Sanjana Sanghi will be a part of much better films someday. But in the meanwhile, she plays possibly the worst female spy character you’ve ever encountered. To call it a caricature would be like saying Aditya Roy Kapur bulked up a little for this film.

And speaking of Kapur, while his impressive physicality does distract you from some of the film’s unintentional hilarity, he is still a very limited actor. The dialogue delivery remains weak, the diction is also patchy. It’s fair to say there’s a lot to learn, but there’s not much learning in films like Rashtra Kavach Om. Yes, he gets to have his fun with gigantic guns and the occasional cool gizmo. But even if he’s leaning into the action hero persona from here on, Kapur has to do a lot more than gnash his teeth and roar, alternated with periods of goggle-eyed confusion and/or betrayal — even Tiger Shroff is trying to do more, which is saying something.

Shroff senior, meanwhile, is playing a scientist here which is remarkable because his character says some pretty stupid things and displays poor judgment throughout his screentime. Riding on the wave of 90s nostalgia that seems to drive so much of Indian pop culture these days, Jackie Shroff is getting major film roles again — good for him, but he has to pull his weight and not drift along in the stupor we find him in here. He’s shockingly bad in Rashtra Kavach Om, it has to be said. Look at Rishi Kapoor’s late career renaissance and the wide variety of roles we saw him playing in his second coming, all the way up till the very end. There’s a lot Jackie can learn from that kind of career trajectory.

The action choreography is actually semi-decent in places, would you believe it? With the overall professionalization of Bollywood, you expect even otherwise terrible films to have competent technical departments and that’s basically one of the few things going for Rashtra Kavach Om. Truth be told, these are the only scenes which Kapil Verma seems to be interested in directing; the rest barely even qualifies as window dressing. Some of the smackdowns Om delivers here are competently put together (with a pinch of cinematic suspension-of-disbelief, as is par for the course).

However, these infrequent thrills are too few, separated by deathly dull passages of anodyne, bordering-on-parody espionage scenes. At over 130 minutes, the film is probably about 30 minutes too long as well. Its attempts to cash in on the macho nationalism formula are feeble and uninspiring. Even action movie diehards might find it difficult to sit through Rashtra Kavach Om.

Aditya Mani Jha is a Delhi-based independent writer and journalist, currently working on a book of essays on Indian comics and graphic novels.

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