Singham Again movie review: Ajay Devgn film is loud, tedious and instantly forgettable

It’s not as if the earlier cop flicks have been music to the ears. Rohit Shetty’s films embrace cacophony heartily, whether they are comedies, actioners, or a mix of both. But the one cardinal thing that this film seems to have forgotten is that your villains have to be, well, villainous. And if there’s one thing that Arjun Kapoor’s chief baddie doesn’t have is a single menacing bone in his body. Hacking heads off is so not his thing: why this piece of hopeless miscasting?

It doesn’t help that he goes by the name Danger Lanka: he is dangerous, and his lair is literally in Sri Lanka, okay? Subtlety is not this director’s suit. Of course, this is just a sobriquet. His real name is Zubair Hafiz, and he is, gasp, ‘not a jihadi’. We have to say that that’s really forward of Shetty.

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Zubair is doing all this bad stuff in India (Madurai, to be precise), because he wants to take ‘badla’: his dada (Jackie Shroff) is in an Indian jail reading a book on Chengez Khan (we are shown the cover more than once just in case we miss it ), and his ‘papa’ and ‘chacha’ were killed by Indian forces. So it’s personal, and yes, Ravan, the Lankan Lord, is also a ‘vidwan’: that’s what a character tells us solemnly. Basically, this film’s baddie is a learned man taking revenge. Huh?

In this very male-cop universe, women do exist. Kareena Kapoor Khan, clad in a series of tasteful saris, manages to get dragged through the forest, and be shot at, without acquiring a single scratch in her perfect manicure. Deepika Padukone dons a uniform, beats up a bunch of baddies, and claims the moniker ‘Lady Singham’. Tiger Shroff is Lakshman: uniform, check, keeping-thugs-at-bay, check, dropped-from-script, check, climactic recall, check. Ranveer Singh, tasked to be the joker of the pack, plays Simmba-Hanuman, and we have to say that he does try. Akshay Kumar shows up last minute, as expected, for his own uniform-slo-mo-strut.

But it’s all so same-old that even the new locations don’t help. Neither does all the blatant-referencing-and-copy-pasting of the great epic, whose scenes can act as pointers when someone else tries their hand at a Bollywood Ramayan in New India.

What next? A Lady Singham solo?

Singham Again movie cast: Ajay Devgn, Kareena Kapoor Khan, Arjun Kapoor, Ranveer Singh, Deepika Padukone, Jackie Shroff, Ravi Kishan
Singham Again movie director: Rohit Shetty
Singham Again movie cast: One and a half stars