Adipurush Is Ramayan As The Game Of Groans

Adipurush

Rating: **

Hey  Valmikiji, look  what they have done to your Ramayan! More ravaged than ravishing, louder than the loudest  shrieks  of  pain heard in Nazi concentration camps, Adipurush is  Ramayanredux  in a very perverse way.

 In this  interpretation  of our most beloved  epic , Rama comes across  as  weak  and  ineffectual.

Ravan roars in cyclic spasms. As played by Saif Ali Khan, he is an ideologue  with his own perverse  dos  and  don’ts. In a nutty-shell he is a  square among circles. Tragically his character gets no chance  to  grow beyond the groan.  Saif  looks like  a character out  of  Game Of Throne rather than the Ramayan.

But then, who said this is the Ramayan?  There are vague resemblances  to Valmiki’s  script.  But Om Raut’s screenplay plays around with the  original, and  not very playfully. What really does this version of the  Ramayan in is solemnity  of the tone.

Adipurush  might have worked as a  snazzy super-sized  spoof on the  original. As a dead-serious out-take on the Ramayan,  Adipurush is disastrously  bad. The  war sequences, the  backbone of this Rama-Ravana faceoff,  are  hedged by  low-hanging stunts  that seem  designed to  provide  instant thrills to the frontbenchers.

Writer-director  Om Raut forgets there are  no frontbenchers  anymore.  That  the average  movie watcher can easily tell the  difference between Game  Of  Thrones and a  game of groans.

Ironically  this  renegade  revisionist take on the Ramayan’s  weakest factor is Prabhas’ Rama.

     Nowhere  do we get to see  his heroic valour in the  scrambling  squalor  between the  ultimate hero and  rogue scholar.Kriti Sanon’s  Sita has nothing much  to do  except to stand under an artificial  tree with paper blossoms falling on  a papier-mache ground,   looking  lost and ready to be  rescued. When  Rama arrives she does a slo-mo  run to an embrace  that reminded me  that even the gods watch Shah Rukh Khan’s romantic  films.

The  editing (Apoorva  Motiwale Sahai, Ashish Mhatre)  of  this ghastly hodgepodge of mythology and mayhem is  infuriatingly inconsistent. Several sequences, such as the one where Rama holds a dialogue  with the  river God for his right  of way to rescue Sita from Lanka, overstay their welcome. Other crucial  links  in the  plot , like Kaikeyi’s connivance are quickly dealt with as the plot moves to one  showoffy can-Pathan-do-this stunt sequence.

Adipurush  leaves  you exhausted and confused. What is  it trying to say and do? I guess we will  never know.