Rennervations review: Jeremy Renner ropes Anil Kapoor into his bizarre vanity project

Which perhaps explains why every episode of Rennervations opens with the same four-minute ‘interview’ segment in which Renner is made to lay out the premise of the show. It’s almost as if Disney anticipated the audience’s bafflement. In these interview segments, Renner tells his sidekick Rory that he’s always liked ‘building things’, but what he really wants to do is ‘to make actionability and thoughtfulness cool as f**k.’ The segment concludes with a theme song in which Renner sings about himself. Sample the lyrics: “Call me the bad guy, call me the saint, tell me I’m crazy, call me insane. I was born a dreamer, with a heart of gold, call me a rebel, I’m just the rubble on the road.”

This is completely on brand for the actor, who once famously launched an app on which people could compete for the title of world’s number one Jeremy Renner fan. The app also housed music that Renner performed with what Karan Johar would describe as ‘conviction’. There’s no other explanation for this. Renner really doesn’t seem to recognise how self-involved all this makes him seem. But while behaviour like this would be mildly amusing otherwise, in the given context, it’s quite off-putting.

Like most of these ‘documentaries’, Rennervations also struggles with the lens — is it, for instance, a show about activism or is it a show about the activist? But presented with the option of shedding the light on either the crew of builders, the nonprofits doing the actual groundwork, or even the children who are eventually supposed to benefit from all this, Rennervations ignores them all and instead points the camera at Renner. We get scenes in which he’s inexplicably playing random musical instruments, singing, or simply gazing into the distance.

Virtually every five minutes, someone pops in to declare how great Renner is for doing this. As if they’d say anything else about their boss. And when others aren’t singing his praises, Renner himself reminds viewers that nothing like this has ever been done before. This might technically be true; why would any real philanthropist spend money on creating a dance studio inside a bus? But Rennervations almost suggests that activism itself is a concept that Renner has invented.

Each of the four episodes ostensibly features a celebrity guest, and while three of them barely bother to show up, one of them predictably overcommits. No prizes for guessing who. Episode two of Rennervations is set in India, and features the beloved Anil Kapoor as Renner’s partner in crime. But while Vanessa Hudgens turns up for three minutes in episode one, and spends each of those three minutes actively trying to figure out what’s happening, Kapoor is present from start to finish in episode two.

Oh, and each ‘build’ is given an arbitrary two-week deadline. There’s no good explanation for why Renner has decided to introduce this angle. Maybe he thought that this would add some dramatic stakes to the story? But this isn’t a contest. The builders could’ve easily taken the time necessary to create these facilities, but instead, especially in the India episode, they appear to compromise on their original plans only because somebody thought that in addition to the difficult work that the builders are tasked with, they should also have to deal with an unreasonable deadline.

“You have to do it for India!” Kapoor tells the crew at one point, clearly having surrendered himself to the part. But does he know that the show he is honouring with so much sincerity can’t even be bothered to correctly identify Indian cities? Aerial establishing shots of ‘New Delhi’ are clearly of Jaipur. In fact, they’re not even of some random corner of the Pink City; if you squint hard enough, you’d probably be able to spot Laxmi Mishthan Bhandar or something. But sloppiness like this is emblematic of the show as a whole. Not only is it questionable on an ethical level, it’s also rather boring to watch. It’s up to you to decide what the bigger crime is.

Rennervations
Cast – Jeremy Renner, Anil Kapoor, Vanessa Hudgens, Sebastián Yatra, Anthony Mackie
Rating – 1/5