Shamshera review: Born to be wild

Ranbir Kapoor in 'Shamshera'. (Image: screen grab)

In its bare bones and in spirit, Karan Malhotra’s Shamshera is the kind of throwback film that ran in theatres long before product-placement, multi-crore marketing spiels and the obligatory 3D (in Hollywood, at least)—when the sole components of a blockbuster-aspirant film were a star hero, a villain, elaborate fight sequences, good music and a happy ending. Reinvigoration of archetypes can be thrilling, and Malhotra and his crew go for it.

Like the eponymous hero—a double role by Ranbir Kapoor—the film flexes a lot of muscles with ambitious visual effects and an unwieldy running time of two hours and 40 minutes. The reported budget of Rs 150 crore is mostly marshalled for spectacle and production design—most of which enhance rather than clutter up the narrative throughline. Malhotra attempts a balance between physicality and poetics like the Bahubali films did, but at a smaller and less sophisticated scale.

Also read: Ranbir Kapoor: "I come from a film family, but I have also been a film fan"

The film is set in the 1800s in a fictional city called Kaza, which resembles a giant dustbowl. Shamshera (Ranbir Kapoor), the leader of a warrior dacoit tribe, is killed by the British army’s Indian executioner Daroga Shuddh Singh (Sanjay Dutt) when he tries to start an uprising to free his tribe from enslavement. Twenty-five years later, Balli (Ranbir Kapoor), Shamshera’s son—a young man with a desire to rise above his circumstances and training to be a warrior under his guru (Ronit Roy)—manages a preternatural escape from imprisonment, making it seem to the authorities that he has died. Balli finds a few of his tribesmen left behind in jungles when the entire tribe was captured, chained and brutalised. All this while, he has been carrying a flame for Sona (Vaani Kapoor), a dancer, whom he whisks away. The small gang he forms comes back to avenge the death of his father and free his tribe.

It’s the eternal prodigal-son-returns plot. Balli could be Moses, he could be Hercules, and he could be Tarzan. In the lead role, Kapoor is required to be brawny as well as vulnerable. The screenplay by Malhotra and Ekta Pathak Malhotra—the story is by Neelesh Misra and Khila Bisht—doesn’t channel the balance between those two sides smoothly. The transition from his days frolicking in the giant dustbowl of a prison and bickering with his mother (Iravati Harshe) and playing the fool with children to being a doting lover to emerging as a formidable warrior wielding the tribe’s totemic weapon on horseback is so hurried that even with the film’s long running time, the character’s arc comes across as a compressed capsule.

Fantasy rules in every possible way. Kapoor is all in. He inhabits the hero’s physicality with ease and confidence, and uses his natural gift as an actor to consistently stay in his character’s rhythms, jarring though those rhythms are. Among his generation of stars, Kapoor is unabashedly old-school in many ways. There is still some mystique around him and with this and the forthcoming Brahmashtra, also a VFX-heavy superhero film, he is going through a phase in which scale trumps story, detail and immersive performance, all of which he is very good at. Here, he has to channel the chivalry, strength and courage of the male hero of epics and myths. He also has to scream a lot. But in that department, Dutt takes the cake as a villain marked by fawning adoration of and enslavement under his white bosses.

The collective testosterone explodes by the deafening climactic sequences, during which Balli does the impossible. Dutt’s character is so full of potential for a layered treatment—he is enslaved, and he in turn enslaves and brutalises. This is possibly the most hammy, unintentionally farcical and sketchy villain Dutt has ever played—and he is painful to watch. Vaani Kapoor, in an ornamental role that requires her to do pelvic thrusts in front of a lot of leering men or scream helplessly, is competent enough. The rest of the cast, including Saurabh Shukla, Ronit Roy and Iravati Harshe follow the film’s tone of shallow-but-loud vein without any sparks or surprises.

Technically, Shamshera has great talent at work—Anay Goswami as cinematographer maps the stark terrain the film is set in in a postcard-pretty gaze. Chandan Arora is editor and Manas Choudhry is sound designer—both well-known and experienced names in the industry. Some of the imagery of chained human beings, contrasted with the wild expanses of deserts, jungles and mountains, have a magnificent charge to them. A supernatural element in the form of charging ravens lends the narrative a mythical undertone.

With all the technical finesse and effort that have obviously gone into the film, its thunderous, head-splitting pitch and inability to go deeper beyond the primary theme of revenge and freedom are what linger. By staying close to an old-school Bollywood template of thumping melodrama, Shamshera demonstrates a pleasing, straight-ahead simplicity of some old videogames: whenever the hero accomplishes a task, a new challenge presents itself. But this is a film—like a cowboy classic, the horses get to kick up some dust as Shamshera Junior takes his brood to freedom in the wild.