Commando 3 Is The Need Of The Hour

Commando 3

Starring Vidyut Jammwal, Gulshan Devaiah, Adah Sharma, Angira Dhar

Directed by Aditya Datt

Rating: *** ½ (3 and a half stars)

 The hero’s entry  in this slick and taut  anti-terror thriller is something else. In an akhada a young  school girl is harassed  by  a wrestler(for  the record  he tugs  at the girl’s skirt and tries to raise it…it’s not the  film but the character who’s being salacious). Vidyut Jammwal crashes into  the  indecorous  scene and , in his words, teaches  the langoti how to  respect the skirt.

Save your applause for later.

Jammwal never fakes it. The  action scenes  in  Commando  3  are  even more heart-in-the-mouth than the ones her  performed  in  Part 1and Part 2. And this is  really the most watchable  of  the  Commando films, richly textured  in its anti-terror passion,  shot  by cinematographer  Mark  Hamilton in gritty basic colours that  never  impinge on  the  febrile  foreground.

Among all the action films  of  2019, Commando 3 feels the most authentic. It  brandishes a flavour of fertile rhetorics and impassioned  stunts which  are never gratuitous. The main conflict is between  the commando -hero Karanveer(Jamwal) and a suave  London based terrorist(played with  restless elan by Gulshan Devaiah) who makes his young son  watch his crimes  of  assassination so that the  boy would grow up knowing why Islam needs to get violently assertive.

The boy  refuses to believe in his Dad’s  pretext for  mayhem. There is a  riveting mix of  thrills and propaganda in the way the co-writers(Darius Yarmil , Junaid Wasi) spring up to confront  our worst fears. No, the fear is  not another bad anti-terror film. We already had two of them Saaho and War  in a row this year.  The worst fear  that our godforsaken  planet faces is  the moral bankruptcy that sanctions killing  in the name of religion.

Commando 3  confronts those fears headlong. In spite  of an unconvincing Hindu-Muslim  bhai-bhai  ending,it  is  an engaging cat-and-mouse  game  between Jamwal and Devaiah. Sadly Jamwal can’t act.But  he sure makes up for it with his stunts. Watch him in a key motorbike chase  and fight on top of garbage dumps  in London…this  chap is  among the  best action heroes in  the world.

Devaiah  as  a cold  ruthless  killer-terrorist who strangles  his wife in front of his  little son is in fearfully credible form. He  gives his jehadi character a long rope and then sits back to watch the character  tie itself up in knots . Like  all action films, this one too doesn’t  know  what to do with its women characters  Adah Sharma (who has fun with her Hyderabadi  accent whenever  the script finds space for her)  and  the  appealing Angira Dhar who  throw in punches whenever  the hero jumps into  the battle zone .

Commando 3 doesn’t try to act ‘cool’  on the global issues  of  terrorism and separatism.But it is very clear in its  abrogation  of  anarchy.