I must have missed the new memo from NCERT on the age of Indian civilization. All this time since childhood, I had always heard of "humari paanch hazaar saal puraani sanskriti", but several times in Singham Again, the new Ajay Devgn starrer directed by his buddy Rohit Shetty under his ever expanding Rohit Shetty Cop Universe (RSCU), the number 9,000 years is thrown out. Maybe the honorable Finance Minister added 4,000 years as GST to the original 5,000, or maybe the 5,000 was all Nehru's fault anyway like everything else is today.
Regardless of that, the tax free status of the movie is assured by its underlying Ramayan themed framework. I guess it's now mandatory to have a Ramayan based movie every year because God knows there just isn't enough Shri Ram in our lives otherwise - Ram Setu (2022), Adipurush (2023) and now Singham Again in 2024. Ramanand Sagar, god bless his soul, would be so proud.
It's the fifth entry in the RSCU and the age, literally and figuratively, is beginning to show of the franchise and its lead star Bajirao Singham (Ajay Devgn looking more wooden and lifeless than an IKEA cabinet), the Iron Man of this desi Marvel. I have enjoyed in the previous installments the antics of its characters and the anti-Newtonian physics of its automobiles, because there was a certain joy and lack of self-consciousness about it. Even the villains like Jaikant Shikre (Prakash Raj) in the original Singham (2011) had a certain humor about them ("Cheating karta hai tu" he says in a plaintive voice). The previous movie in the franchise Sooryavanshi (2021) also had action and humor and a killer remix version of the song Tip tip barsa paani with a silver sari clad Katrina Kaif dancing with abandon in the rain. In this movie, the first half is singularly devoid of fun of any kind except a brief scene in which Singham's son Shaurya (Viren Vazirani) tries to explain the Gen Z term "situationship" to his dad. The rest of the first half is dominated by Singham's wife Avni (Kareena Kapoor Khan) putting on a Ramleela show thus giving the director an opportunity to intercut scenes from it to accompany the unfolding story as a kind of "Ramayan for Dummies" with each character being tagged to a Ramayan character as some kind of mythological Instagram. Two new cops whose name start with the letter S are introduced (so i guess they will have their own spinoffs at some point when Singham is an elder care facility) - Lady Singham aka Shakti Shetty (Deepika Padukone) and Satya Bali (Tiger Shroff). The OG villain Omar Hafeez (Jackie Shroff) returns and now has a grandson Zubair Hafeez (Arjun Kapoor, trying his best to channel Bobby Deol from Animal (2023) in his thick beard hirsuteness and copious blood spattering on face knife slashing).
The second half picks up somewhat with Ranveer Singh reprising his role as Simmba and bringing some much needed levity to the hitherto mirthless proceedings. Some more repartee and fun is added when Akshay Kumar comes in for a brief cameo as Sooryavanshi. But by that time even the verdant surroundings of the isle of Serendip (from where we get the word serendipity) aka Sri Lanka can't lift one's spirits. The movie ends with an Easter Egg cameo in the end credits promising a cross pollination with another cop franchise, Lawrence Bishnoi be damned.
Due to a copyright issue with T-Series who are no longer the music label, even the iconic background score from the previous Singham movies had to be modified. Also to the best of my knowledge, I didn't hear him say "Aata majhi satakli" even once. The lion has truly been neutered rendering the Singham ho-hum.
November 3, 2024
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