Action Stations:
Amazing, that an actor’s abs and the line “what is torture for you is warm up for me” — can inspire four action films in the Baaghi franchise– this fourth film easily winning the contest for the worst.
Tiger Shroff as Ronny, could well be sending signals to be cast as Superman. He easily breaks chains and handcuffs, is shot at, stabbed, slashed with machetes, and a few minutes later looks like he just got up from a refreshing nap.
Most of the time, he and other males are simply screaming “Yaaah!” to save the dialogue writer some trouble. In Baaghi 4, directed by A Harsha (but the action director does the heavy lifting) and adapted from the 2013 Tamil film Ainthu Ainthu Ainthu, Ronny is pulled out of a car crash just in time to prevent being run over by a train. The doctor solemnly tells his brother Jeetu (Shreyas Talpade) that he has “gone into a coma, because of being brain dead.”
Even when out of the coma (“welcome to the land of the living,” chirps a nurse), Ronny looks lost and talks of his girlfriend Alisha (Harnaaz Sandhu), who, everybody tells him, is a figment of his damaged mind. A wiseass cop (Upendra Limaye), tries to help him trace the imaginary girlfriend, but nobody in the police force seems to care when large buildings are gutted, or armies of men in fancy dress costumes are slaughtered by Ronny on a rampage. His brother sends him a hooker, Olivia (Sonam Bajwa), to try to get him to forget the imaginary girlfriend, about whom he gets into vivid flashbacks that involve Punjabi song-dance numbers. He gets poor Olivia to scrub the dishes and clean his house. Still, she falls in love with him.
The villain turns out to be Chacko (Sanjay Dutt), with a psycho brother Paulo (Saurabh Sachdeva), who stands around grinning, when he is not playing a strange wind instrument. Chacko lives in a sepulchral mansion, and is the generic bad guy, (“mafia ka sambandhi, a background rap song informs) the one who had bands of hitmen dressed in matching costumes – in one flight scene towards the end, they are all in beige suits with hats, which stay on their heads even when they fall down dead.
Producer Sajid Nadiadwala takes credit as co-writer with Rajat Arora, though, what writing? Bits of plot and dialogue exist in between a few romantic interludes (Harnaaz Sandhu is pretty and confident), elaborate hallucination sequences orchestrated by Chacko, when a single bullet would do the job of getting Ronny out of the way. And also the very vicious fights in which Ronny invariably gets to toss his shirt aside to flaunt that star-making physique. A whole city’s supply of red dye must have been used up in this film alone.
Sanjay Dutt, playing a modern-day Raavan type, mooning over a woman, waiting for her to forget her boyfriend and marry him. Dutt looks like he would rather be anywhere else, but, then, he gets a monologue challenging God in a church, that invokes a literal deus ex machina exit.
If it wasn’t so violent, there would have been a few unintended laughs in Baaghi 4, but this one has not a shred of humour amidst the nonstop mayhem.
(This piece first appeared in rediff.com)
