Shool: Manoj Bajpayee’s cult hit has aged terribly; did he not realise that he’s playing the villain, not the hero?

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Sayaji Shinde in Shool. (Express Archive)

Samar gets into several scuffles during the course of the film, which was presented as a spiritual follow-up to Ram Gopal Varma’s smash hit Satya. Many of his key collaborators returned, although RGV resigned himself to the producer’s position, handing over the directorial reins to his former assistant E Niwas. While few Bollywood films of that era can match the sheer pizazz of Satya, it’s interesting to note that Shool debuted only a few years prior to Rajkumar Santoshi’s far more accomplished (and infinitely more progressive) Khakee. In that film, Amitabh Bachchan’s character was perpetually on the back foot, actively trying to avoid a violent confrontation while protecting a falsely accused Muslim man from the mob.

But we never quite understand the source of Samar’s angst. Why is he this rigid? Both his parents are hale and hearty, so he probably isn’t driven by a sense of vengeance like Batman. He is an authoritative figure, and not a lowly ‘hawaldar’ looking to prove himself. He has a loving wife and daughter who sing a fun little song for him in the first half hour, which means that he can’t be lonely and morose either. So, why is Samar so furious all the time? And more importantly, why does Shool not realise that the bane of his existence isn’t the corruption of those around him, but his own anger.

While his crusade begins innocently enough — Samar reprimands some loafers for harassing a young woman, and suspends a constable for turning a blind eye to a very low-level extortion racket — it escalates into something more dangerous when he picks a fight with a local goon. Played by Sayaji Shinde, the character Bachchu Bhaiya also has one foot in the world of politics. A phone call from him is enough to reverse Samar’s arrests, and it doesn’t take too long for them to lock horns.

Manoj Bajpayee and Raveena Tandon in Shool. (Express Archive)

Shool would’ve been far more interesting had it been designed as a battle of wits and male egos. But the conflicts are far too simplistic. Plus, the movie doesn’t view Samar as a problematic person at all, so there’s no question of it examining his behaviour. He says he’s a family man, but he rarely spends time with his wife and daughter. In fact, even when it’s clear that his devotion to duty has painted a target on their backs, he doesn’t slow down. When he’s inevitably suspended — a staple of any cop film — he continues engaging with Bachchu Bhaiya’s goons.

Almost as punishment for his perceived moral purity, the movie concocts an incredibly off-putting scene in which Samar’s daughter dies during a street-side skirmish. There are certain invisible lines that movies avoid crossing; while it’s common for Indian films to use women as sacrificial lambs, even the most tone-deaf filmmakers tend to stop in their tracks before harming kids. To be clear, Shool isn’t transgressive; it uses the child’s death purely as a manipulative plot point. Having tasted blood, it takes things a notch higher when, not 10 minutes later, Samar’s wife dies by suicide. Played by Raveena Tandon, this character is such a non-entity that you can’t help but wonder if she existed only to be killed off.

Raveena Tandon and Manoj Bajpayee in Shool. (Express Archive)

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And as if these two beats weren’t unhinged enough, this is when Shool decides to transform Samar into a straight-up vigilante. Like Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver, who dressed up in military fatigues and went on a murderous rampage to satisfy his false sense of righteousness, a completely broken Samar infiltrates the state legislature and executes Bachchu Bhaiya in front of a viewing public. Only, Shool doesn’t present Samar’s transformation as a cautionary tale. The movie sees him as a hero, an avenging angel, the saviour of humanity. Samar’s actions could be blamed on his grief, but having him pointedly dressed in his police uniform suggests that the movie wants more cops to emulate him. This is corroborated by the title card that Shool opens with, in which the filmmakers pay tribute to Samar even before it turns into something that Milap Zaveri might have playing on loop at his house.

Shool was produced at a time when Mumbai was overrun by the underworld. Killing gangsters in cold blood was considered the correct thing to do. In some circles, it still is. The movie could be forgiven for being a product of its times, but that wouldn’t be fair on all the other storytellers who had the foresight and emotional intelligence to recognise right from wrong, even when the society around them loudly declared otherwise. The only person who appears to be having fun is Anurag Kashyap, credited for the film’s often humorous dialogue. But Shool isn’t as radical as the films he’d go on to make himself; in fact, it’s a pandering exercise in pedestrian moviemaking.