In a scene from Mission Raniganj: The Great Bharat Rescue, miners stuck inside a flooded site are sent food through an ingenious hole which the rescue team has bored overnight. While everyone chomps into whatever their families have cooked, Bhola, played by Ravi Kishan sits by himself visibly irate. When asked, he responds “Sabke ghar se ayaa hai meat, machhi aur dal. Aur humare bapu ne bheja hai lauki.” It’s a scene that channels Kishan’s obstinate self to exact a moment of sincere joy. It’s also one of the few sequences that gives this film a sense of rootedness, in something other than its leading man’s halo. Mission Raniganj is well-intended, boasts a thrilling second half and is ably headlined by Akshay Kumar. All of that good work, however, contradicts the film’s visual insincerity, reflected in the hastening of a struggle and the thinning of its emotional toil.
Kumar plays Jaswant Singh Gill, a ‘mining rescue expert’. After a routine detonation cracks open an untargeted layer of soil, water floods the Mahabir Colliery at Raniganj, a site run by Coal India Limited. On site is the chief of the operation Ujjwal, played by a chain-smoking Kumud Mishra, who could have used something else to hold onto other than a cigarette that never seems run out. Gill hears about the collapse of one of the sites and decides to pitch in which is shorthand these days for Kumar-saves-the-day. Also present at the rescue site is the corrupt Sen, played exceptionally well by Dibyendu Bhattacharya. Sen is a conniving native who views tragedy as just another horse to straddle his opportunism with. He is devious, lazy and unapologetically offensive.
Inspired by a true story, Mission Raniganj, has the making of a nail-biting survival drama. There are essentially two films here one that unfurls on the surface, and the other that unfolds under it. While Gill and co. scramble for ideas and ammunition to drill holes and ideas into the unyielding surface of Raniganj below them, anxious miners battle hunger, paranoia and mounting resentment. Ironically, the story below the surface is dumbed down to represent a bunch of stubborn, quarrelling colleagues. Precious little is offered as sociological insight into the making of a life that is built quite literally around hunting for a black rock from hell. Instead, a solitary moment that connects a man’s torn shoes to dehumanising poverty, offers a simplistic commentary on a miner’s gritty reality. It doesn’t help that an ensemble cast featuring the likes of Kishan, Varun Badola, Pawan Malhotra, Jameel Khan to name a few, is given precious little to do other than emote horror and concern.
Directed by Tinu Suresh Desai, a serial collaborator of Kumar’s, this film has momentum, a fairly captivating story but lacks the sincerity to actually tell it in the fabric it deserves. In a scene where Gill and Ujjwal chat, the background is made up of horrendously distracting CGI which is expected to transport us to a time and a place that none of us can possibly conceive. That insincerity, or laziness is reflected in the manner in which some of the film’s more intimate relationships are drawn out. Gill’s wife played by Parineeti Chopra, gets to do precious little except piously wax lyrical about the well-sung hero she has been married to. Mishra is wasted as a walking-talking cigarette holder, who remains a nervous wreck for the entirety of the film. It’s a shame that a story so compelling in its subtext, grounded in its origin, and unequal by definition is seen through the homogenising lens of lofty heroism alone.
That said, Mission Raniganj once it gets into the meatier half of its extraction plan, propelled by machinery instead of men,egged by poisonous vapours and a chilling countdown, that it becomes undeniably affecting. Once the colourful antics of its many characters have been side-lined in favour of a single-minded rescue operation, the unfussy nature of the task itself smoothens any and all bumps. A hole is dug, contact made, people rescued and the day saved. It’s expectedly direct, with a twist here and there, but it does what a film of its fibrous texture is expected to.
It’s hard not to be manipulated by determined, against-all-odds stories of survival but in the context of a mining disaster, the lens surely must also move towards the evaluation of a social tragedy. i.e. the stark inequality that pushes men down brutalising rabbit holes they aren’t guaranteed to return from. While we stay above the surface, comfortably detached, conveniently reassured of the existence of heroes like Gill. Mission Raniganj is a half-decent survival story that unfortunately never aspires to also become the instrument of a retrospective social survey. It can be enjoyed as an exciting, life-affirming ride built around some criminally poor CGI. But for something more inquisitive, daring and earnest you are better off watching Yash Chopra’s Kaala Patthar (1979).
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