Bollywood has a disastrous history with superhero flicks and only back in the 20th century, I guess, was a good superhero film – ‘Mr. India’ – and in 21st century, only ‘Krrish’ had good feedbacks. Rest ‘Drona’, ‘Ra One’, ‘Krrish 3’ and now even ‘A Flying Jatt’ would suffer a similar fate of poor reception, although ‘Krrish 3’ and ‘Ra One’ earned a lot but even because of a Janmashtami release, it would be difficult for this Jatt to fly.
Malhotra (Kay Kay Menon) is an evil businessman whose industries contribute to pollution quite generously and he wants to build a bridge for the smooth movement of his trucks across the lake but a sacred Sikh tree is in its way (while they can conveniently make a bridge from some other side of the lake, as shown in the geographic representation of the lake in an initial scene.). So he obviously sends his people to strike a deal with the owner of the land and they get beaten up, not by the Jatt but by his mother. So he uses other tactics and sends his best henchmen, Raka (Nathan Jones) to cut off the tree but in comes the Jatt – Aman (Tiger Shroff) – who is a martial arts teacher at a local school and due to some unforeseen circumstances, both get their powers (which are nothing new) and starts a superhero saga.
Kay Kay Menon’s last superhero villain film was ‘Drona’, and just like that, here too he fails to leave a mark. Jacqueline Fernandez as a compulsory-superhero-should-have-a-love-angle girl is irritating, both to eyes and ears. She has shown her pure overacting side here. Even though Shraddha Kapoor has a 10 second appearance, still she acted better than rest of the lot. Nathan Jones has nothing else to do then just scream and he is the hammiest thing about the characters.
TIger Shroff is going down as an actor, and even his scenes look very feminine, especially dance ones as if the character is coming-out-of-closet. Right in his first scene you know that he is trying too hard and is failing to get the emotions, body language, vocal tone and expressions right. He was good in ‘Heropanti’, fair enough in ‘Baaghi’ but in this he has failed. Even his action scenes are boring, same old flips that he did in previous films; he even did those flips in the latest single with Disha Patani, is that flip all you’ve learnt Tiger? Gaurav Pandey is the sole person who has genuine comedy scenes and who does justice to his role.
Songs are awful; background score for the villain is the best music in the whole 150 minutes long and tiring film.
Story is direct and not suggestive, forget metaphorical. Right at the start, the credits suggested that if you kill nature then it will also kill you and same is shown in the film. But here Raka is shown to have his power through pollution and immediately, for no reason, Kay Kay is seen to preach local people on how they have polluted the city and it is them who will be the reason for Flying Jatt’s defeat. The film feels like just-for-kids but then a crass song – Beat Pe Booty (video suggests that the set for song was ‘inspired’ from Nicky Minaj’s ‘Ananconda’) – comes up. I am not even going to start with the number of ‘inspirations’ in the film (Batman Vs Superman’s Superman in space resurrection scene, then X-Men’s epic Quicksilver scene, and plenty more).
The screenplay is too wayward for the film to be taken seriously as seriously at one time the director, Remo, wants us not to take it seriously and just few minutes they want us to. Remo shows that the superhero is lighting fast with the ‘Quicksilver’ adapted scene but doesn’t show same when he fights the big villain (as sloppy and faulty as the screenplay). Remo tries hard to portray that a superhero is also a common man making him buy ‘Lauki’ but poor execution makes it fall flat. His take on the affiliation of the time ’12’ with Sardar is inspirational but in such a film where it feels like a parody of superheroes, it too wouldn’t leave a mark.
Everyone who watches Bollywood knows that making a quality superhero film needs high budget and dedication (something in shortage in Bollywood for Sci-fi genre) and so it is difficult to make a convincing superhero here. I just hope that Phantom productions do some justice to the Indian superhero ‘Doga’ because the most realistic director of India – Anurag Kashyap – is affiliated with it.
Stakhil 