Cast: Ranbir Kapoor, Vaani Kapoor, and Sanjay Dutt
Director: Karan Malhotra
First things first, how did Ranbir Kapoor find it in him to do this movie? And then the audacity of promoting it as something even close to entertainment.
Sorry, but no amount of money spent on getting influencers to push your product works – when the product is dead on arrival.
Sorry influencers, bet you got huge tremors to interact with Ranbir and cash to make your posts but at least know what you are putting your name on.
Yash Raj Films makes another movie gone bad. The story of Shamshera is not that it lost the plot, the real scoop is that there is no plot to pivot it on.
Classified as an action movie, it inflicts upon your senses the burden of being a historical as well.
In fiction, the voiceover sets the context for the period in which the story is set in the second half of the 19th century. The movie tells the story of a rebel and his tribe. The Khameran is a warrior tribe that assisted the Rajputs during their battle against the Mughals. After the Rajputs are defeated, the Khamerans leave and try to settle in the city of Kaza. The Kaza residents, however, banish them due to their lower caste status. The Khamerans face a tough time. With no other option, they turn into plunderers and make life hell for the rich residents of Kaza.
WATCH OUR REVIEW HERE
Shamshera (Ranbir Kapoor) is the leader of the tribe and under his guidance, the Khamerans become quite notorious and dreaded. The Kaza residents approach the British government for help against the Khamerans. Inspector Shuddh Singh (Sanjay Dutt) is given the responsibility. They attack the Khamerans and almost defeat them. Shuddh Singh then gives Shamshera an offer. He tells him to surrender and in return, he’ll allow the rest of the Khamerans to settle in a faraway place where they can regain their lost glory. Shamshera agrees. He and the rest of the tribals are taken to Kaza Fort. However, Shuddh Singh cheats them. He imprisons all Khamerans and tortures them.
Shamshera makes his displeasure clear to the British and Shuddh Singh. Shuddh Singh then gives him another offer. If the Khamerans are able to produce 5000 grams of gold, they’ll be let off. This time, they make this deal official by signing an agreement. Shamshera finds out that there’s a secret tunnel in the pond which connects to the Azaad river outside. He wants to find the tunnel and escape so that he can arrange for the funds. While escaping, he gets caught. Shamshera had told his wife (Iravati Harshe) before the escape that if he is caught by the authorities, she should disown him. Hence, she announces that Shamshera is a coward who was trying to flee, leaving the Khamerans behind. She does so to spare the lives of her fellow Khamerans. The Khamerans stone Shamshera to death.
Shamshera’s pregnant wife gives birth to Balli. 25 years later. Balli (Ranbir Kapoor) is a carefree, young lad. He has no respect for Shamshera as he has grown up hearing only ill about his father. Shamshera’s trusted aide Pir Baba (Ronit Roy) gives him training which makes him capable of all untoward situations. After Shuddh Singh humiliates Balli, his mother tells him the truth about his father. Balli decides to fulfill his father’s wish. He tries to escape from the Kaza Fort. Unlike his father, he’s successful and he manages to find the secret tunnel through which he escapes and reaches the city of Nagina. What happens next forms the rest of the film.
In the extremely dated story, very behind its times, Ekta Pathak Malhotra and Karan Malhotra’s screenplay is a mindless two-plus hours where we were holding our heads, lest our brains walked out in protest.
Are these filmmakers so out of touch with their audiences?
The movie feels like a chaotic ride in the park making us nauseatingly distraught.
In the initial 30 minutes, of the 2 hours 38 min long movie, a voiceover sets the ‘historical’ context for what is up ahead, one’s inquisitiveness is a bit evoked since it is seemingly clear that the protagonist is, for a change, going to be a man who is from the lowest level of the caste hierarchy and, therefore, at the receiving end of discrimination. Also, he isn’t one to take things lying down and is determined to lead his tribe out of the darkness.
But as the filmsy story progresses, the film’s anti-caste stance disappears and the battle royale boils down to a feud between two men – a tormentor and a revenge seeker.
They spent so much money on a movie where the only dialogue worth our attention in Piyush Mishra’s script was ‘karam se dacait, dharam se azaad’,
Karan Malhotra kinda scores in the first 30 minutes but it feels as if he lost interest in the details of the project later.
Vaani wears modern fabrics in her seductive dances in the 19th century and we are supposed to applaud the blood and sweat that went into making the movie?
Ranbir Kapoor – 4 years after his appearance in 2018’s Sanju is the main guy of the movie and it seems he is surprised by the intensity of “historical fiction” in the script as well since he has played the eponymic character as well as his son, two men engaged, a quarter century apart, in a battle of freedom for their oppressed warrior tribe deceived into servitude by the British Raj.
The principal antagonist is Sanjay Dutt. He does a wild variation on Agneepath’s Kancha Cheena and KGF’s Adheera and dissolves into a crude caricature that carries no menace at all.
The character of Shuddh Singh remains puzzling- was he a baddie or was he just a baddie? He is struggling to figure that out throughout the movie.. It is shocking to see that despite Shuddh Singh shooting Colonel Freddy Young (Craig McGinlay) and showing him the gun, he does not get punished. Even Sona’s (Vaani Kapoor) character is not well fleshed out. Somehow ( we don’t know why) she leaves a fine dancing career and turns into a rebel. And then she gets angry at Shamshera when he saves her life. Why? No Idea.
Shamshera presents fake history with so much authority that you half expect a dangerous Mughal general or a merciless British officer to pop out of the woodwork so that our multi-hyphenate hero can display his talent.
In this totally male-dominated landscape, only two women have a bit to do. Iravati Harshe is cast as Shamshera’s wife and Vaani Kapoor plays a dancer who helps Shamshera’s son Lalli carry his father’s ax-wielding legacy forward.
The women are tokens and so is Ronit Bose Roy, who plays mentor to Lalli as grows up in captivity before braving out into the world to settle scores.
The visual effects are a monstrosity and the CGI is very sub-standard. The fort (one of the film’s principal locations) looks like fabricated sets and the train sequence is another badly executed scene
Sometimes it’s difficult to figure out if the objects in the movie are cows or birds. What an embarrassment.
Also, don’t forget that we are so advanced in the F category historical that in the 19th century, there is a printing press that produces a daily Hindi newspaper called Dainik Darpan (Daily Mirror) that keeps the bad guy abreast of what is going on around him. What’s more, the hero – remember he never got out of jail until he was a grown-up lad – knows enough to write neat notes in Devanagari for anybody who cares to read.
The music album of Shamshera composed by Mithoon grows on you as you listen to the tunes. The title track is what won us over really encapsulating the overall theme and naturally making you a root for the journey of exploration and understanding Balli goes through it acts as the introduction short of Shamshera. There is also this devious, almost horror-like background score that is utilized that works exceptionally well for the second half of the film.
Shamshera is not a home run. It is a warning to Indian filmmakers to stay away from grandiose historical projects till they learn what makes these stories The Game of Thrones.
