"Would you have called me a Congressi had I made a movie on Nehru or Gandhi?", asked Randeep Hooda in an interview raising his fingers at the critics mentioning him as a supporter of RSS (although he is free to choose it) and playing the card of being an actor and just doing his job. We as reviewers fall into the same block of Legos and hence, watched this movie by keeping my spectacles with "Left" and "Right" lenses at my working desk. With this, let's dissect this movie into four points.
1 - Plot of the movie
The plot of the movie would be highly predictable if someone would have read Savarkar's life. Unfortunately, there are not many people like that and therefore, one would feel it like a fresh biopic made by toning down "entertainment" and keeping the focus on 30 years of his life which had a lot of events. The movie starts with a plague that was brought by the British rats on their ships to India. Being the son of a revolutionary, Savarkar was affected by the way Britishers mercilessly killed Indians who had the disease and blamed it on the poor people. Similar to any revolutionary that existed in India, he worked with a collaborative team that had the same vision (Free India Society and Abhinav Bharat) and made use of weapons to stand on the same pedestal as Brits and incite some feat in them.
He makes his journey from India to England to Paris and then is sentenced to Kala Pani (Cellular Jail of Andamans) every Indian has read or heard if they are not living in a cave. It becomes interesting to see what events led him there and certainly bite your nails on the fact that all those could have been avoided.
2 - Performances of the movie
The film is led by Randeep Hooda playing Vinayak Savarkar and Amit Sial playing Ganesh Savarkar, his elder brother. Both of the actors have proven their worth with interesting and challenging past projects including Sarabjit. While no one can complain about Amit Sial, it is true that even though Randeep Hooda tries to inhale the character of Vinayak, he still cannot overshadow Amit Sial because of their varying personalities and no one actor competing to be the main hero in the film. There are moments where Randeep's voice is as good as the real Vinayak Savarkar while his gait has always reflected the revolutionary in every scene including the hand movements and the rude behavior he acquired due to years of false allegations and frustrations.
The movie also casts Ankita Lokhande whose performance would not have mattered much due to extremely less screen time and even fewer dialogues. She has done a decent job of portraying Vinayak Savarkar's wife in whatever screen space she could acquire.
3 - Direction of the movie
Randeep Hooda became an accidental movie director through Swatantra Veer Savarkar when he took this job while in the middle of his weight loss journey. The direction is refreshing as per Indian cinema and certainly looks like inspired by pieces of Scorcesses' movies always rushing ahead by directly showing the events rather than building them up for five minutes (except for a few extremely important scenes).
The direction is not as good as it could have been given. The camera angles are abrupt in a lot of places giving only 50% of the screen to the actor in that angle. There are a lot of static shots and camera movement is kept to a minimum. Also, if shot lengths had increased by at least 30 seconds on average, it could have been better given that there were intense dialogue scenes. Although, given that it's a three-hour-long movie, the audience does not get bored or lose interest.
The screenplay is good, and kudos to Randeep that he has not twisted any fact just for entertainment. I verified most of the scenes and they are written as they happened including the dialogues.
4 - The music of the movie
As a movie based on a revolution, it is expected to have some energetic music that brings out the inner patriot in you. This movie, too, incorporates those elements and has kept them at regular intervals. The movie only provides a couple of songs out of which "Vande Mataram" stands out as a fresh retake of the conventional sound we are accustomed to hearing (as sung by AR Rahman). The movie ends with a Savarkar rap which I believe was motivated by the popular Shivaji rap but Randeep stitched it during the credits to avoid any judgments on the songs and criticism of the music of his movie.
When we hear Veer Savarkar's name it seems the first thing that comes to mind is Hindutva. Yes, it is true that he was the force behind the Hindutva movements of which political parties are riding their horses today. But a man is more than the stamp a society puts on him. It would not be true if only science students watched Abdul Kalam's biopic. Whoever the person is, it is always a treat to watch their evolution into what they became in the end even if they were mass murderers like Hitler. With this, I give this movie 3/4, cutting out a point on direction for which, I believe, Shoojit Sircar would have been an excellent choice.
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