Bholaa is a crazy film. No, that’s not it. Bholaa is a batshit crazy film. Bholaa has two Sikhs, in a jungle, in the middle of the night, doing wheelies on tractors as they try to rein in a truck. That’s more like it. Now, I am all for going berserk. Action sequences don’t necessarily have to be plausible. Eject from a car falling off a cliff while you grab your lover mid-air and superhero-land; or unleash some feral animals at a British high official’s party. I am game. But an action scene in a film is the payoff, not the narrative. Although Bholaa has some cleverly crafted set pieces, at times it feels like a video game jumping from a boss fight to a boss fight, without any cutscenes.
A remake of the 2019 Tamil film Kaithi, Bholaa takes the logline from the original.A recently-released convict, teams up with an injured cop to transport drugged-out policemen in a truck. Parallelly, there is a deranged gangster is trying to enter a police station and retrieve his drug overhaul. Now, Bholaa takes some creative liberties.
The film opens with a chase sequence during the day, and we get a deservedly heroic introduction of Tabu as IPS Diana Joseph. It is a bang-on start but leaves no scope for any build-up. Bholaa has an incessant urge to give instant gratification to its viewers. Its dialogue resorts to rhyme to seek attention, its action comes like a barrage of bullets, balancing somewhere between being mindless and meticulous and its emotional foundation constantly trembles.
Coming back to heroic introductions, Bholaa has a certain affinity for verbosity. We meet the titular character in jail while he is reading the Bhagavad Gita. As he exits the prison, a prisoner, as if on cue, starts giving a voiceover. “The less you know about him, the better…those who did, didn’t survive” I guess we know more than enough. In Kaithi, Karthi’s Dilli has a subtler, more enigmatic introduction in which he sits in a police car, just another guy, picked up because he seemed suspicious. Bholaa impatiently throws everything at the audience to elicit a response.
Although initially enjoyable, the action becomes almost lunatic as the film proceeds. There is a masked biker gang which looks like it was probably on its way to a talent show, there is a CGIed leopard (which, sadly, runs away), a kachcha gang uncharacteristically beefed up, and many moustached men battle-crying with bazookas atop jeeps. Once you know Bholaa is invincible (and if you don’t yet Makarand Deshpande will remind you) there is no sense of threat left in the action. The film, however, needs to be applauded for not shying away from the gore. There are close-ups of bones breaking, teeth flying after a slap, and a man’s chest being pierced by a fist. It’s something novel for a Hindi film but that’s it.
Bholaa can’t stand any lulls in the narrative, lest you spot its flaws. Kaithi, in its heart, was a story of a father meeting his daughter for the first time. Bholaa weaves its emotional bits around its action and not in its centre. Ajay seems stony in showing sentiment. The scenes involving his daughter fail to provide fuel for the action that ensues. In the approach of being broody, he ends up being one-note. By the time Bholaa has sliced goons with a trident, broken innumerable necks and tattered them with a gatling gun, I am thinking the title Rudra would have been better suited for the film. Oh well.
Director: Ajay Devgn
Starring: Ajay Devgn, Tabu, Deepak Dobriyal, Sanjay Mishra