Bholaa: Is Ajay Devgn secretly a genius action director?

A remake of Lokesh Kannagaraj’s 2019 Tamil-language hit Kaithi, starring Karthi, Bholaa takes the basic structure and characters of that film, but replaces its relatively gritty tone with what can only be described as a Looney Toons vibe. The cartoonish intensity of the movie, about a man who is enlisted by an injured cop to drive them (and 40 unconscious police officers) to safety in a truck while gangsters relentlessly chase them along a highway, completely evaporates when Devgn decides to introduce drama to the proceedings.

Bholaa is best enjoyed as a breakneck action spectacle that would’ve been at least 70% better had Devgn made the bold decision to remove most of the soapy backstory and designed the entire film around its three set-pieces. These set-pieces arrive at the end of each act, and involve such hilariously over-the-top moments as Devgn punching a guy’s spine out of his body, scaring a cheetah with sheer presence alone, and swatting away an airborne motorbike like it’s a housefly. Sure, it’s all in service of making Bholaa, and by extension Devgn himself, seem like a superhuman. But there’s a palpable lack of vanity in the filmmaking itself; you can feel his childlike glee in these scenes.

Through these three action sequences, Devgn doesn’t merely reveal himself to be an uncommonly skilled action filmmaker — there was little evidence of this in Runway 34 and Shivaay — but on the flip-side, he also exposes his utter incapability to craft a single believable human moment. It’s as if he can only communicate via action, because in those three set-pieces, not only does Devgn deliver plenty of thrill and spectacle, but he suddenly seems to grasp the importance of character and tension.

The first unfolds like a Mad Max-style chase along a single stretch of road, as Bholaa and his two companions — the injured cop Diana and the comic relief Kadchi — are ambushed by a gang of bikers wearing LED face masks. Fuelled by tandoori chicken and a deep desire to reunite with a daughter he’s never laid eyes on, Bholaa manages to evade the bikers using wit, ingenuity, and sheer brute force. And this is an apt way to describe the sequence itself. Shot with kinetic drones and compact handheld cameras, the scene has a tremendous forward momentum, which makes sense; the truck that Bholaa is driving never comes to a halt. Devgn escalates the stakes with every passing second, as Bholaa first knocks out a couple of goons with his hulking vehicle, hands over the wheel to his companions as he jumps on the roof, and then commandeers a stray bike. It ends with a particularly inventive moment involving a burning tarp.

The second set-piece offers a desi spin on the Jackie Chan format of close-combat. Bholaa even uses his ‘gamcha’ as a weapon at one point, which has to be a deliberate reference to Chan’s signature fighting style. But Devgn knows that Bholaa isn’t as nimble as the Hong Kong superstar, and so, it makes sense for him to have a less balletic and more brutal style of combat. This is the scene in which goons wait their turn to be mangled into a pile of bones and blood by Bholaa. Like the rest of the film, this sequence exists in an elevated reality; the goons, for example, all seem to be wearing uniform shorts. The tension that is entirely missing from the film’s dramatic moments magically makes itself felt in this scene, which is designed almost like a Western stand-off, and shot in lush long takes that allow the viewer to soak everything in without getting a headache.

This John Wick-style of shooting extends to the film’s final action scene, in which Bholaa basically turns into a superhero, and murders scores of people with a ‘trishul’ while a remixed version of “Aaj Phir Jeene Ki Tamanna Hai” blasts in the background. Again, there’s no shaky-cam, no quick-cutting, no visible stunt doubles. Bholaa may as well be dancing to Lata Mangeshkar. A resounding money shot in which he races a bike towards a car and shashliks the driver in the head with a spear is both jaw-droppingly violent and giddily transgressive. The Central Board of Film Certification has been infamously lenient towards violence in the past, but it’s shocking that Bholaa was rated U/A.

While promoting his last film Runway 34, Devgn often bragged about how he’d managed to fit over half-a-dozen cameras into a scale replica of a cockpit. He said this as if it’s something to be admired. It isn’t really. The only thing that an admission like this reveals is that Devgn walked into that film without a clear vision, and with the intention of ‘finding’ the movie on the edit table because he’d shot all the coverage. Peter Jackson used around 40 cameras for some scenes in the Hobbit trilogy, and those movies had the same problem; there was no authorship to them. But in Bholaa, the action seems fluid, meticulously planned, and expertly choreographed. It’s the work of a man with a vision, even if the vision itself is limited.