Ram Setu Is Kantara Without The Climactic Dance

Ram Setu

Written  & Directed by Abhishek Sharma

Rating: **

Ram Setu tries really hard  to be  politically correct. It is  a product soaked, no  dyed  in saffron.

I don’t know what  the  original colour  of  the  plot was. Certainly not green. But perhaps  initially they wanted to make  film tinged  in saffron  rather than drowned  in  the preferred colour. What we finally get is Akshay Kumar as an  archeologist  whom we first meet in Afghanistan  . It is  the kind of overpunctuated underlined prologue  which  even James Bond would find  exhausting,so who are we  to  live through it?

 Live, we  do. There is  so much more to come. A lot of it plainly ridiculous. At some point the plot  inexplicably moves to Sri Lanka  because that is  where Raavan apparently lived(whether  the geographical  Sri Lanka is actually the Lanka referred to in the Ramayan is  a debatable  point).And if our hero Aryan can prove the existence  of Raavan he can  prove the existence  of Ram and that the Ram Setu was built by Ram.

Forget the Setu. I am still trying to locate the bridge between the mythological and the rational in this oddly lackluster back-to-roots drama. Imagine Kantara without its  heartstopping last thirty minutes. That’s Ram Setu for you.

The cinematography  (by Aseem  Mishra) is a saving grace , as it  trails  Archeologist  Akshay, and his comely  assistants Jacqueline Fernandez and  Jeniffer Piccinato(who are in it for the  ride in the  jungles  of Sri Lanka)  and a South Indian Hanuman AP, short for Anjani Putra  played  by a lively Satyadev Kancharana.

 The rest  of the cast is caught between the  whimper and the  blast . There is little  here  to hold  on to except some very  poor imitation of Indiana Jones, with Akshay  Kumar looking more like director Abhishek Sharma than  Harrison Ford.

Dr  Chandraprakash Dwivedi who  is credited as ‘creative  producer’ has  a lot to answer for.

Where but in this  film does  mythology  mingle with history with such unfruitful bland results?  We will never know.