Jawan Review: A Massy Entertainer!

JAWAN

Director- Atlee

Cast- Shahrukh Khan, Nayanthara, Deepika Padukone, Sanya Malhotra, Sunil Grover, Vijay Sethupathi and Sanjay Dutt

Platform of Release- Theatres

Rating-

By Jyothi Venkatesh

At the outset, you see Shah Rukh Khan playing a goofy, wisecracking vigilante with a shaved head —as he hijacks a metro train in Mumbai. He’s assisted by a squad of female fighters, and the film revolves around a mysterious masked vigilante, who is a jailer moonlighting as a vigilante, with a look-alike called Captain Vikram Rathod, a patriot who sets out to accelerate some right societal changes, in his own unique ways works towards enabling justice by taking on a dangerous arms dealer Kali (Vijay Sethupathi), along with his own army of super heroic women.

 To begin with, Shah Rukh Khan seems to revel in his action hero era, without the handicap of either a Raj or for that matter Rahul as usual, who seem to have released SRK from their magnetic spell so he can wholeheartedly embrace the smouldering Pathaan and Jawan. I would not at all be exaggerating if I were to state that SRK is excellent in both the roles of the father and the son and also seamlessly slips into South sensation Atlee’s universe, a rather unknown new territory for him and succeeds in entertaining in this high-octane action thriller rooted in drama.

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Vijay Sethupathi, always dressed in black, and scowling and growling and being menacing, does manage to leave a mark, though his dialogue delivery with Tamil accent leaves a lot to be desired. Sanjay Dutt adds his menacing presence to the scenes though why has he been cast as Madhav Nair though he does not at all look like a Malayalee of mouth lines like Nayak Nahi Nair Hoon Main baffles you. The highlight of the film is that the writers Sumit Arora, Atlee and Ramanagirivasan get the dialoguebaazi right even while the khichdi of the story rotates between several moods – humour, tragedy and revenge, and the lover boy king Khan’s tough avatar treads an altogether new mysterious path.

The brief romantic track between Nayanthara and SRK doesn’t unfortunately work, and Nayanthara has been related to some slick action scenes while the all women squad comprising Nayanthara, Priyamani, Sanya Malhotra, Girija Oak and Riddhi Dogra make their presence felt. Deepika Padukone impresses in a special appearance. While there is nothing that distracts you from the plot that has far too many twists and turns, at 2 hours 49 minutes, the film definitely needs a tighter edit.

Like his latest one Jawan, which also has a father and a son in the central roles, the last two films of Atlee in Tamil, notably, were massy, twisty stories centered on fathers and sons. Like every Atlee film, this one is also a massy entertainer that abounds with a lot of ceeti extracting dialogues, but all said and done, I would also say that Jawan isn’t a morally challenging or ambiguous film like say Baazigar, but it still manages to stretch the limits of its superstar’s repertoire.