Baaghi 2 Movie Review: It Is All About Tiger’s Adrenaline, & Nothing Else

Movie: Baaghi 2

Starring: Tiger Shroff, Disha Patani, Manoj Bajpai, Randeep Hooda, Deepak Dobriyal

Directed by: Ahmed  Khan

Rating: * ½ (one  and a  half stars)

All this while we rued what Jacqueline Fernandez  was seen doing to the iconic Ek do teen  song and dance  number. Turns   out, this travesty was  the least  of  the  problems in  Baaghi 2, an overblown, padded-up and puffed-out adaptation  of last year’s engrossing Telugu  hit Kshanam  about an NRI who is summoned back to India by his former girlfriend  to find her kidnapped  daughter.

Finding the missing girl is not all that concerns the Hindi remake’s hero, now rechristened  Ranveer Pratap Singh,am armyman who gets  a chance to use his battle tactics to a wage a kinetic war  on  drug dealers in an elaborately  staged Rambo-like climax that finds Tiger Shroff flying high…literally. He somersaults over flying choppers, flips over conifers, flies across  cars and vanquishes adversaries with the  quick-thinking machismo  of a sumo wrestler thrown  into a ring with a cunning and dangerous canine.

  Tiger’s Ranveer stops at  nothing.The trouble  is, the  film doesn’t know where  to stop either.  The original plot had some interesting twists and  turns in the kidnapping drama. In the remake the  drama of a distressed  mother(Disha Patani, so one-note and so pale and pretty  your heart reaches  out to her for all the wrong reasons)  and her  saviour  is  converted  into a  loud scream-fest where  everyone has  a ‘bawl’.

 There is so much sound  and fury in the  storytelling that I was convinced  it signified something . Alas, all I came  away with was a convoluted attempt to regurgitate  a solid thriller  by injecting  large  doses  of bombast and  melodrama into the  original.

 Nothing in Baaghi 2  is  done gently.Certainly not the editing  which  bulldozes  through  the  event-packed narrative caring  little for niceties like pace and momentum.Every move is a a slog, every slap is a  sledgehammer. Julius Packiam’s background  music which tries to keep up with Tiger’s  rush of bravado ,could wake up a pack of comatose wolves, although it could do nothing to keep me  from  falling  into a dreadful  numbness of the spirit, the  kind one feels when a bunch of  over-enthusiastic kindergarten   boys try to do a  stage version  of  an Amitabh Bachchan actioner  from  the 1980s.

Throughout there is a feeling  of outdated bravado, an expired  bluster which no amount  of  stunt-baazi  can camouflage. Tiger Shroff’s  action scenes are a saving grace,though  most of the stunts are staged with chairs tables and  glass doors breaking  with pre-orchestrated regularity.

The  surprises  in the  original  film are here rendered utterly  ineffectual as  the narrative pounds and pulverizes  the plot with puerility.

Everyone hams. Pratiek Babbar and , surprisingly  Manoj Bajpai  ham so much it is an embarrassment to watch them whenever they are on screen. With Babbar  that’s not a  major problem as  the script has little time for  him. The only one who gets away with  the hamming is Randeep Hooda. His long-haired hippy-esque cop-act is  put forward  with a certain degree  of intelligence, otherwise found to be lacking in almost every sequence.

At one point in the preposterous  plot, a cop is seen propositioning a distressed  mother  nudging her legs with his legs to suggest what they can do when those legs are not walking.

And  all the while Tiger Shroff seethes  in anger. No wonder  he erupts with the vehemence  of a battle-bound  gun blazing at enemies across the  border.  His Rambo act in the third act of this  horribly-botched  remake saves the day but fails to rescue  the  film from its numbing nemesis.

 Does Tiger find the  kidnap  victim? Does anyone  really care what happens  to the missing  child when we have more urgent concerns , like trying to hold on to our senses while  characters talk nonsense  like “Muslims are  not  only known  for biryani but also for qurbani.”

This, coming from an actor as able Deepak Dobriyal is  a shame. But then , what  is  not?