Bholaa, the new movie from director-star Ajay Devgn, is currently available on Prime Video. At one point in the movie, you realise that it is more weirder than you had anticipated. No, it isn’t when they name a real astrologer in the opening credits (jyotish salahkaar!). It’s when Deepak Dobriyal‘s villain, who resembles a cross between Captain Jack Sparrow and a man who has served time in an Uttar Pradesh prison, kills a lot of thugs while rhythmically dancing to an item number that is playing in the background. A wonderfully timed blending of dancing and violence, it sets the tone for the wildly unpredictable film that will come next.
Unambiguously, Bholaa is a bad movie. In fact, a good deal of it is very annoying. The background soundtrack seems to be directly competing with Vikram Vedha to see who can be louder — a musical metaphor for the aggressive face-offs that dominate both movies — and the dialogue is bad. The sound mix is also askew. More painfully, Tabu is underused, and the movie’s closing act essentially makes it part of the soft-Hindutva batch of Hindi movies that are currently experiencing such a spike in popularity. However, the action sequence that the film, which was co-directed by Ramazan Bulut and RP Yadav, unleashes when it stops in its tracks (quite literally, it turns out), is unquestionably magnificent. I’m having a hard time recalling the last time there was such a chasm between the calibre of one specific aspect of a film and the rest of it. Maybe the music from X-Men: Dark Phoenix by Hans Zimmer?
Bholaa, a 2019 Tamil-language blockbuster directed by Lokesh Kannagaraj and starring Karthi, takes the fundamental plot and characters of Kaithi, but swaps out its somewhat grim tone with something that can only be described as a Looney Toons vibe. When Devgn decides to add drama to the situation, the ludicrous intensity of the film—about a man who is hired by an injured cop to drive them (and 40 unconscious police officers) to safety in a truck while thugs pursue them mercilessly along a highway—completely vanishes.
The best way to experience Bholaa is as a frenetic action spectacle, which would have been at least 70% better had Devgn taken the risky step of cutting out most of the soapy narrative and basing the entire movie around its three set-pieces. These action-packed set pieces take place at the conclusion of each act and feature wonderfully outrageous scenes like Devgn knocking a man’s spine out of his body, startling a cheetah with his mere presence and swatting a flying motorbike away like a house fly. Yes, everything is done to make Bholaa and, consequently, Devgn appear to be superhuman. However, the filmmaking itself exhibits a real lack of vanity; you can sense his youthful joy in these instances.
Through these three action scenes, Devgn not only demonstrates his exceptional abilities as an action director—which was hard to see in Runway 34 and Shivaay—but also highlights his complete inability to create a single believable human moment. Devgn not only provides enough of adrenaline and spectacle in those three set-pieces, but he also seems to suddenly understand the significance of character and tension, as if he can only express himself through action.
source from: msn.com
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