Muscle Madness:
Rating: 1 & 1/2 stars:
If there is a Commando 3, there must have been two films before it, but even the most ardent Bollywood fan would have to strain to remember them. This violent, but otherwise blandly generic action film, directed by Aditya Datt is most likely to suffer the same fate.
Starring Vidyut Jammwal—or rather his muscles and man bun—in the role of Karan Dogra, super patriot—who enters the film frowning, to beat up a bunch of pehlwans harassing schoolgirls, and hardly stops to take a breath through the film’s running time. Fortunately, the film stays with its skinny script, and doesn’t stop for any needless song breaks or emotional subplots. One of the two women in the film serves as mild comic relief with her strange accent, but mostly they are in pursuit of a London-based terrorist, Buraq Ansari (Gulshan Devaiah—looking uneasy) who wants to blow up cities in India.
Karan is sent to London with Bhavna (Adah Sharma), to join up with British Intelligence agents (Angira Dhar, Sumeet Thakur) and flush out the terrorist group. Buraq not only terrorizes his own ex-wife (Feryna Wazheir and son (Atharva Vishwakarma), he also manages to indoctrinate Muslim youth in India, and Hindu boys from converting to Islam and joining his cause. He wants to make a bigger bang than 9/11 to avenge the wrongs suffered by Muslims in India. It’s not clear whether his rabid anti-India stance is personal, or just general psychopathic cussedness.
The Brits are not as cooperative as the Indians would like (they must be pissed off at Indian film crews causing mayhem in their streets and stately mansions), and so, they are left to do their own hunting and fighting. The four-member Buraq-chasing crew is remarkably daft—Bhavna, supposedly undercover, posts social media messages with her own handle, and none of them even refers to their phone GPS when a sign for a road diversion suddenly appears.
The ‘Muslims must prove their loyalty to the country’ undercurrent that runs through the film is obnoxious, and the action scenes, though shot with a brisk efficiency, are hardly nail-biting. Some of these brainless action films tend to be inadvertently funny; Commando 3 is just unremittingly dull.
