If one were to predict the kind of film Rohit Shetty’s “Sooryavanshi” was going to turn out to be, purely from its four-minute trailer, chances are that they would have got it right. The trailer laid out everything one could expect from this film: preaching, loud explosions, an ear-splitting background score, histrionics, a simplistic worldview, and a dull protagonist. Fifteen minutes in, “Sooryavanshi” has ticked them all. By the end of 145 minutes, I realised that the trailer functioned as a linear summary of the actual film. Should I have bothered at all? Shetty’s films, especially the entries in his ‘copverse,’ rarely deviate from a formula that guarantees commercial success. “Sooryavanshi,” mounted on a much bigger scale than the director’s previous films, plays it safe. It would have been foolish to expect otherwise. There’s little here by way of plot, a pastiche of ideas from the many jingoistic films we saw in the last few years: Terrorist sleeper cells have been activated, a plot is hatched, and a city is under threat. Would the titular top cop save the day? No prizes for guessing.
But the surprises in “Sooryavanshi” come from—incredibly—Shetty’s direction. There is a hint of an effort to go beyond just style this time around; Shetty’s direction has more depth and flashes of maturity. Sample this scene, for example: after the terrorist plot is set in motion, two terrorists, both old friends, sit under a tree in the dark of the night and share a quiet moment, knowing this is the last time they will see each other. Or a scene in which a terrorist, while bidding goodbye to his son, tells him to study hard, when his own father has ordered him to execute a terror attack. Or a rather heavy-handed but rousing sequence later in the film that makes a plea for communal harmony. These moments are few, very few, and far in between, but they reassure us that future entries in this series may take more and possibly bigger risks.
But these touches do little to relieve us from boredom. “Sooryavanshi” unfolds in predictable fashion. The protagonist, Veer Sooryavanshi, is projected as a demigod who never takes a step wrong, an old cliché reserved for major movie stars. Characters reiterate the brilliance of Veer Sooryavanshi, he who put country over everything else, even family. The only mistake Sooryavanshi makes is letting his personal and professional lives collide once, resulting in his son getting hit by a bullet. Sooryavanshi is guilt-stricken, but this angle is used to alert us to the innumerable sacrifices that police officers make while serving their country. Noble intention, terrible execution: we get a few speeches of varying lengths to hammer the point home. But this is the mode usually preferred by Shetty, who avoids subtlety like a plague: he creates conflicts through which one character will relay the point Shetty wants to make to another character. These characters never break the fourth wall, but they might as well have.
Notably, “Sooryavanshi” is rife with a bunch of problems common to Shetty’s ‘copverse’ films. Vigilante justice is projected as a necessity in some cases, a couple of issues are watered down to good-versus-evil, and toxic masculinity is championed. Sooryavanshi, like his colleagues from “Singham,” “Singham Returns” and “Simmba,” doesn’t seem to care much for the legal process. It is an especially insensitive point to make in the current political climate, given that the film is also keen on establishing Sooryavanshi as a true patriot. Also equally problematic is the film’s handling of the character of Ria, the wife of the protagonist, relegated here to a position where her job is to simply accentuate her husband’s heroics by being his antithesis. Ria is a ghost of other similar female characters seen in the two “Singham” films and in “Simmba,” only a shade more developed. It’s unfortunate that four films later this series is still struggling to properly accommodate female characters.
Its problematic politics aside, “Sooryavanshi” is that rare example of a big-budget starrer getting a well-worn formula wrong. Bowing out after pitching a bigger sequel is definitely an interesting thought if not exactly encouraging.
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