Just how damagingly awful is Shamshera?

Ranbir Kapoor never fails to surprise. I always thought he would never be able to do a film worse than Abhinav Kashyap ’s Besharam  in his career. But just nine years later Ranbir has upped the trash level with a pseudo-historical that suddenly makes us look more kindly at producers Yash Raj’s last historical Samrat Prithviraj .

That too has Sanjay Dutt in the cast playing Samrat’s trusted lieutenant. This time in Shamshera , Dutt platys the archvillain Shuddh Singh during the British Raj. The law unto himself, unstoppably vile, Dutt is to Shamshera what Chris Evans is to Netflix’s The Gray Man : a menace beyond all tolerance.

Abandoning his habitual subtly empathetic approach to his character Ranbir Kapoor, whom we all love as an actor, romances loud acting as though acting were going out of fashion. And if there is one thing that this Kapoor is not, it is unfashionable. Ranbir sinks into his double role of father-outlaw and son-outlaw with the kind of hammy self-assurance that Sunil Dutt adopted in his rightly popular dacoit dramas.

Ranbir starts off playing his grandfather Raj Kapoor in Jis Desh Mein Ganga Behti Hai . He is playful, mischievous, innocent and politically disaffected. Then Ranbir’s character does a flip flop. He now wants to be Sunil Dutt in Mujhe Jeene Do…Or is it Yash in KGF ? Come to think of it, the slave-torture sequences in the second–half of this tediously prolonged narrative travesty seem to be out-takes from Yash’s KGF.

Oh, I forgot to mention, the film is set during the British Raj…that is the Brtish Raj according to Hindi cinema where the ‘Kutta Gora Log’ are either abducting young women or snarling, “You Indian dogs!”

But it’s not the Britishers who are the problem in Shamshera. It is the naive amateurish groundwork in the script that allows all the heroism in the pre-Independence to rest on Ranbir Kapoor’s frail shoulders. Ranbir tries hard to lift the plot from where it insists on slipping back every time writers seem to be on a break, and that is quite often.

Most of the time, Shamshera moves on its own volition unsupported by script, direction, performances or music. Music reminds me of Vaani Kapoor who reminds me of Katrina Kaif in Thugs Of Hindostan . They both play nautch girls during the British Raj who are more Chikni Chameli than 1800s.

In the last half an hour of Shamshera—officially the climax—Vaani has to run around the dusty wilderness holding what is supposed to be a baby. Vaani doesn’t even pretend that the rag in her hand holds a baby. She squeezes the rag into an incriminating shapelessness that defeats the original intention completely. Quite like what the screenwriters have done to this film. I am sure Aditya Chopra advised them to write something…ummmm…. Epic? With lots of action.

The action is almost relentless. One of them has Vaani tied to a khatiya(charpoy) pushed around all across an open square by the villain Shudh Singh. Later there is a tongue-in-cheek reference to that action scene when Ranbir speaks of the archvillain’s khatiya khada.

I don’t think any member of the audience would catch the reference. The one constant wish that keeps us going with director Karan Malhotra’s perversely ponderous plot is the hope that somewhere down the line some miracle would happen, and Shamshera would regain lost ground.

To call this one of the most disappointing films in loving memory would be an understatement. The pervasive mediocrity of the writing and the persistent tone of a wannabe RRR would shock you. Is this meant to revive the movie business? There are many films that Ranbir Kapoor would proudly want to show his child. This is not one of them.

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.

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