All Roar No Bite - Singham Again

God, if you're reading this. I would love to have the two hours of my life back. The refund is secondary at this point.

I would first like to let everyone know that I have no bias against the Singham or Rohit Shetty fandom. I loved Singham one, two and even Simmba was enjoyable. I did not even know this movie was out until I entered my dad's home and saw it's poster. Neither had I seen the trailer before the movie.

Let's start off with the timing of the movie. Releasing this movie during the time of Diwali was a genius move. Rohit knew that even if the movie is bad, people would regardless go for the sake of timepass. I mean, that's what we did. But that does not mean we'd accept a bad movie. Which is what happened. 

Let's start with the story

Now when I say this, I don't necessarily want a complex story with all turns and twists, even a simple one works. But the "story" of this movie was very oversaturated. A lot of different charectors that are made to play a significant role. The worst part was that they tried to connect the story of the cop universe with that of The Ramayana.

I hated this. Not that I hate Ramayana, I love the story. But because of that, we need to leave that story alone. And it's a seperate thing that we have already experienced so many version and reiterations of it. It felt like every few minutes, the director Rohit was trying to show us "Hey! See? I've connected even THIS scene with Ramayana!", it was not needed and the movie would've probably been slightly better without it. As I feel that solely basing it on Ramayana saturated the charecters, storyline and even the climax.

The characters...

This was a whole seperate issue with this movie alone. The story would've been just as good and simple with just Ajay Devgan. But I had not asked for the combo pack of Ranveer Singh, Akshay Kumar, Tiger Shroff, Deepika Padukone, Jackie Shroff and Arjun Kapoor. 

Now i would've enjoyed it if they had a major role to play, but all of them just served the role of minor side characters. I don't care if this movie was supposed to act as an intro for their own solo movies, because Believe me, those are not needed.

I'd say all characters, their acting and their dialogues were extremely dry here. Ranveer definitely showed more energy and his punchlines and jokes saved this movie from being a full serious and dark disaster. So, props to him.

The problem with the concept

Now we've seen a lot of bad movies and I've let them slide. But the problem with this one worsens...

As a part of Indian Cinema, we've always loved those typical "Masala" storylines and movies, something that isn't too deep, stay entertaining and is good for time pass.

But this trend of Nationalism slowly turning into a genre for movies is lethal for many reasons. We've seen the same story and message a hundred times, and trying to sell the movie by connecting it to mythical or religious anecdotes solely in order to sell more tickets and hope the movie connects with them is just an old trick being played that still works. Can't blame anybody if even I paid for the tickets. 

Another issue was the very clear and blatant connection it tried to make with FAST & FURIOUS at the end but so less people brought it to light. The message with all of them being one family at the end and them being shown fighting together was just too corny, and considering even Fast and Furious franchises have been receiving backlash for being repetitive and loss of actual story over the years, it really feels stupid that Rohit tried to plagiarise that aspect out of all. 

My point is, please stop making movies that solely try to sell based on nationalism and stop always trying to connect modern movie elements with legends and mythologies. Even if it's done in a naive way, it feels deliberate as Indians love it when the element of their God is brought into movies. 

And stop trying to copy what's turning bad, i believe Rohit can still make original movies with basic storyline, good action and a limited star cast that focuses more on some other elements such as screenplay, music and more acting.

Also, they replaced the Singham theme song with something that sounds more like a rally for Singham the Politician. I'm reducing points for that.

So, I'm going to give this movie 2 Simmbas out of 7 Sooryavanshis.