Rashtra Kavach Om Is A Sleek Bourne-Vita For The Action Fans

Rashtra Kavach Om

Starring Aditya Roy Kapur, Sanjana Sanghi,Jackie Shroff,Ashutosh Rana, Prakash Raj

Directed  by Kapil  Verma

Rating: *** ½

When we meet for the  first time after the opening action , Aditya Roy Kapur  has lost his memory(pronounced  ‘mammary’ by one  of the salient actors throughout the  film), which is  a blessing since he has forgotten Anil Kapoor’s hamming in  last week’s film.

Roy Kapoor looking lean mean wiry and  super-athletic, like Sanjay  Dutt on a Keto diet , can’t remember  whether he is Rishi  or  Om. Double  role? No no. Fortunately  not. The  government agent is just  stressed with all the  shooting, some of it right in his  chest and brain.

No wonder  Rishi/Om has lost his mind. “He will remember me the minute he sees me,” says  Rishi/Om’s  mother, played with  long-suffering sighs  by  poor Prachi  Desai and prepares his favourite kesar kheer which her beloved  beta loved before amnesia  struck. Roy Kapoor gorges  on  the kheer  clearly worried  about what it  would do to his Keto diet.

Diet be damned. There is so much to  chew on in Rashtra Kavach Om. Director Kapil Verma keeps  the  proceedings on  a fox trot. Some of the action sequences are staged with arresting elan. And Roy Kapoor is  clearly up to  the task. Some of the  supporting cast, the  standby soldiers  to save   the nation from the baddies(how about a  mission to save audiences  from bad films?) are in the  mood  to entertain.Vicky Arora  keeps exclaiming, ‘What the luck/duck/truck’ …everything but the  ‘F’  word.Then there is the token Muslim soldier ready to die  for  the  country.

This is  clearly  a film meant for  family audiences, and never mind the heavy doses of  action staged  with  much verve and a background  score that knows about punctuation  marks.

The  cinematographer  Vineet Malhotra  gives a striking visual look to the film especially towards  the climax when the  restless cast moves to Armenia  for  the  final bang-bang amidst a  while lot of ‘shocking’ revelations which includes a tilt of the  cap to patricide and  a plea for keeping  our country  safe  from foreign hands.

By the time Elnaaz Nourozi  dropped  in  for an  item song, I was already wondering when the sequel  to this action-adventure  will show up.