Shubhra Gupta

The moment you see a happy family in a train compartment, with a little girl and her big doll, you know something wicked this way comes. The girl vanishes, and her increasingly distraught parents, Bani (Taapsee Pannu) and Gokul (Ishwak Singh) find no help from the local police in Joypurra (fictional, of course), somewhere in Bengal. This is the kind of small town we see in streaming shows, as constructed as their plots, sequence after sequence filled with loud background music trying to stand in for tension because nothing on screen cuts it, either because we’ve been inundated with similar stuff, or we simply can’t buy any of it. Or both.

Babita aka Baby is your average Indian woman, trying to navigate politics at the work-place as well as in her domestic sphere. It could be the story played out in millions of households, but the thing that makes this film different is that Babita is a cop, elevated by circumstances into her position. The fact that hers is a ‘compassionate posting’ keeps coming up: a death in Baby’s family empties up a spot at the police station, which she steps into, with her colleagues expecting her to earn her place over and over again. The fact that it parallels her home situation, as a wife and daughter-in-law, is not hidden either: dutiful bahus are expected to fill empty spots day after day, to keep the family happy.

“So you think I’m a bad guy? No, I think you’re toxic.” This exchange comes at a point in the film by which time it’s been clearly established that Raya (Yash) is the kind of Alpha male who thinks blood spatters are the best accessories ever, especially when they spurt from freshly torn and broken limbs. So is that even a question? No, it’s entirely rhetorical. It’s exactly the thing that defines this post-Independence gangster saga, all 3 hours 15 minutes of it, for an audience primed for as much gore as the leading man can dish out, especially when he’s seen how it got lapped up in his previous mammoth hits (KGF 1 and 2).

A global cartel called 7 Dogs. A super-strong drug called Pink Lady. Good guys. Bad guys. And a billion-dollar budget. Make that billions. And there’s your Big Arabic Blockbuster, studded with international stars and locations, its India release buoyed by the presence of Salman Khan and Sanjay Dutt. I must confess that I went into the movie mostly to see what the two Bollywood superstars would do in a film like this one, whose plot-line resembles countless films they’ve been part of. Clearly, the Belgian-Moroccan director duo of two of the ‘Bad Boys’ capers– as well as a couple of episodes in the enjoyable series ‘Ms Marvel’– are capable of mounting films on scale, creating kinetic set-pieces with a high degree of entertainment.

In its opening credits, Batwara 1947 brings back a significant logo. The title appears in Urdu along with Hindi and English, like it used to through so many decades, a practice which vanished quietly in the last decade. That erasure, gradual but evident, is an indicator of the state of the nation, which is busy being polarised over religion and language. It also marks a reunion between Rajkumar Santoshi and Sunny Deol, a director-star duo who gave us Ghayal, Damini, Ghatak, some of the most enduring hits of the 90s. Capturing a specific time and place, those films had a strong streak of social realism which Santoshi had a knack for, and which Deol channeled with rage and purpose.

Shivam Pandit, the straggly-haired shooter with a golden heart, is back. And it would seem, miraculously, that nothing much has changed between the 2007 Awarapan and this sequel, which doesn’t stray far from the thematic palette of the original, keeping the lead actor intact. It’s yesterday once more. Emraan Hashmi is clearly older. But his hair is as straggly. He is as much a wounded hero, a role Hashmi owns, as he was back in the day. And he is as lethal, which is a good thing because he is up against a new set of mobsters, gun-toting henchmen, helpless young women, as he goes about looking for a little girl in the clutches of a gang of human traffickers.

Reacher fans, rejoice. I’m delighted to report that Season 4 of the one and only Jack No Middle Name Reacher, which has him up against a formidable pair of enemies, is a humdinger. Based on ‘Gone Tomorrow’, Lee Child’s 13th novel featuring Reacher, it begins in a Philadelphia subway in which a woman kills herself. It catapults our hero, busy minding his business till someone makes it their business, into a breakneck adventure involving an assortment of characters, including bent cops, incompetent CIA agents, evasive US presidential candidates, and sundry others, all looking desperately for a missing pen-drive. What’s so important on that drive that it needs to be found at all costs? How is it connected to congressman John Samson (Marc Blucas) and his fiercely protective wife (Kathleen Robertson)? What is it that two women from Indonesia, the attractive Lila Hoth (Agnez Mo) and her mother, Amisha (Anggun) are searching for? Why are people being killed in the most ghastly manner, with dismembered corpses strewn all over the place?

Kids and dogs are an irresistible combination. Ohh My Dog gives us, yes, dogs with their undying love and loyalty, which make you remember a time when Indian cinema made films which children could watch with delight. In an Assam village, Apu (Maahi Rai) discovers his beloved Momo has gone missing. Both the distraught boy and his mother (Geeta Aggarwal Sharma) go to the local cop-station to file a complaint. A policeman (Vijay Mishra) is finally moved by Apu’s distress and swings into action, but he is too slow for the smart kid with sharp sleuth instincts (a nice Satyajit Ray-Feluda touch there), who begins tracking his beloved Momo with the help of his teacher (Sulakhyana Baruah).