“Jab apun darta hai na, toh bohat marta hai,” Guddu, the youthful protagonist of Ganapath, says repeatedly over the course of this vaguely dystopian sci-fi film. As far as movies about martial arts and scarred underdogs go, this story offers promise without ever delivering it. It occurs in two parts. The first one is spent poking a wannabe charlatan, urging him to grab the moment he has been born for. The second is spent christening him as the chosen one, the coming of a legend who will fight for good against evil. The first part is borderline insufferable because it requires tact, acting prowess, precision and directorial vision. The second one is distinctly watchable, at times even exhilarating, because it foregoes any or all cinematic duties in the service of a performer who can do some breathtakingly incredible things, except the one that undersigns his occupation – acting.
Set in the dystopian future, Ganapath is prefaced by the decline of the human race. Continuous war and conflict have pushed humans to reactively shift to hotspots where life is still sustainable. The migration has resulted in a mixing of races, resources and the edification of power and agency. There is a clear divide between the poor and the rich, with sugary, neon-lit cities of the wealthy, protected from the impoverished via an insurmountable boundary wall. Some of this world-building feels familiar enough to give Ganpath the credit of observational prudence. The poor survive on breadcrumbs and the rich control the means of existence. The economy of the elite, get this, is sustained by a fist-fighting competition (how that exactly works is a moot point). All of this is explained by Amitabh Bachchan in a voiceover that extends to two or three cameos in which he is dressed as a grandpa sage.
Tiger Shroff is Guddu, a nimble-footed playboy who works for John ‘The Englishman’, a colonial czar who controls the city by organizing fights, and speaks through a groaning device attached to the back of his neck. Again, how an entire economy sustains on the back of a vicious cycle built upon elites betting on knuckleheaded fighters, is never really explained. There is a token class tussle between the controlling, bourgeois residents of the city and the tanned, unwashed grisly prisoners of the satellite village. None of the class anxiety or social deprivation is studied under the lens in a film that makes bafflingly poor choices despite its decent premise. Our narrator (Bachchan) tells us that a ‘yodha’ will come and fight for the poor and while the film makes a somewhat tolerable meal of dragging Guddu to that moment of reckoning, you can practically spit that part out, because it strangles a fairly promising plot.
Guddu is thrown out of the city for innocuous reasons – he cozies up to the boss’ wife. Urged to shift to the poor half of this dichotomous landscape, he meets Jassi, played decently well by Kriti Sanon. Jassi brings Guddu to Shiva, a blind, guru-like figure played by Rahman, who will obviously help him find his true, redemptive calling. It doesn’t sound like a terrible plot in itself except the first half feels corrosively hammy, a massacre of visual, aural and performative proportions. The script is so poorly tied together that even two decent twists – one about the hero’s identity and another about his motive – arrive right past the interval, after patience has worn thin and the horizon has grounded.
For all the barbarously poor CGI, the awfully clunky world-building, and the criminal waste of an ambitious idea, Ganapath, directed by Vikas Bahl, is somewhat redeemed by an all-action second half. The flaws of the first half trickle into the second, but once Shroff shrugs off his inhibitions and dives into the martial arts sauce that makes him unique to our cinema, there is plenty to savour in a strictly sporting sense.
Shroff can barely act, but once he is on the tarmac, imperiously gliding across floors with improbable ease and awe-inspiring stunts, he is a sight to behold. There is this balletic, illustrative quality to the way he anchors clean, close-quarter fight sequences. Even the silhouette of his airborne, stretched figure is a poetic motif, a sight so ecstatically pure it makes you wonder just why can’t a director get him to croon a lean, modest, martial arts film. In one scene he looks at a Bruce Lee painting, and then mimics his famous stance. It tells you everything that the actor can maybe become but is refusing to.
Instead, Shroff & Co go for broke, placing this tepid martial arts story in a dystopian setting that ends up being the adhesive that keeps everything from bleeding dry of inspiration. Budgetary constraints and creative profligacy mire a film that can’t even decide if it wants to portray a uniformly wry landscape, or something punctuated by patches of heaven. Because it rains, moments before a dense forest makes an appearance. Even the boundary wall that separates the poor from the rich Guddu bypasses, by quite literally diving through a separation in the mesh. Everything feels so randomized and under-thought that only Tiger Shroff’s callisthenic brilliance can save the day, in countless more ways than the last one.
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