Agni movie review: Pratik Gandhi is excellent in Rahul Dholakia’s damp film

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That firefighters are unsung heroes whom citizens never acknowledge, let alone recognise, is a fact that’s at the heart of the film. Serious health hazards is part of their job description, which seems to be no one’s problem except their own families who are forced to make peace with the constant precarity they have to live with. And that does come through, even if the manner in which writers Dholakia and Vijay Maurya (the latter has also written the dialogues, spreading in his one-liners across characters) go about telling sits occasionally at odds with the mostly realistic feel of the movie.

Divyenndu plays a movie cop who has seen too many movie cops doing the swag thing, in which his Samit Sawant is surrounded by admiring lackeys who seem to be there to applaud his quips rather than get on with it. There’s also a neta more interested in getting his photos in the paper than solving the multiple cases of arson that the city is engulfed in: we’ve seen this sort of character multiple times.

Both the women, Sai Tamhankar as Vithalrao’s faithful wife who lives in fear every time he goes out on call, as well as Saiyami Kher as a doughty female firefighter, do their job well. The former also has to deal with a young son who thinks his cop uncle, Samit, is the man to emulate, and not his own father: nice touch, but again you know how this will end, especially when the plot heads into a whodunit terrain, chasing the mystery arsonist. The compulsion to add in unnecessary drama to make the narrative compelling is the weakness of this otherwise welcome life-like strands.

What works is when the film focuses on its main intent. The re-creation of deadly fires in scenes filled with smoke and screams is effective. We see how high the stakes are when a few characters lose their lives in the line of duty: there’s nothing romantic about third degree burns. We see the commitment that these heroes have to their jobs, even as they rail against ‘the system’ which doesn’t give them the support they need: the excellent Pratik Gandhi makes you believe in his Vithal who has fought fires all his life, and will continue doing so.

Agni
Director – Rahul Dholakia
Cast – Pratik Gandhi, Divyenndu, Sai Tamhankar, Saiyami Kher, Jitendra Joshi, Udit Arora, Kabir Shah
Rating – 2.5/5