My expectations from the fourth instalment of a largely moribund series was below zero. To my surprise, I found myself enjoying Baaghi 4 more than many recent potboilers, including the overrated Lokah.
If you set your mind aside, Baaghi 4 is feral fun. It starts with a massive car crash and never stops ricocheting with its impact, as the protagonist Ronnie (Tiger Shroff) sets off on a journey to find his lady love, who, everyone claims, doesn’t exist.
On paper, the plot is preposterous. It’s in the way the director A. Harsha knits the action into a pulsating, pulpy pastiche that the film has you by your… er, jowls.
Surprisingly, the content is not as violent as the trailer had suggested (why scare off the squeamish?). In fact, until the climax, there is more of the drama of trauma, as the shattered hero Ronnie awakens after a long coma, knowing he won’t be able to sleep until he finds the girl of his dreams, Alisha, played by semi-newcomer Harnaaz Sandhu, who negotiates through her double role with confidence.
The highlight of the primeval face-off between two aashiq is the Sanjay Dutt-Tiger one-to-one at the climax, where Tiger rips off his shirt. Dutt doesn’t. This is clearly the point of succession beyond the script, where the mantle of the Action Hero passes on from Sanjay Dutt to Tiger Shroff.
Shroff has worked discernibly hard on his body language and spoken lines to create a lover on the edge, at times literally. This guy doesn’t care whether he lives or dies. He just wants to get his love back. Tiger brings a sense of desperate urgency to Ronnie’s character.
For a masculine action project, the female lead Harnaaz Kaur Sandhu has a lot to do. The other female lead Sonam Bajwa is wasted. But it is not a gender thing: even the talented Shreyas Talpade, playing Tiger’s brother, looks lost.
Not his fault. The fulcrum of dramatic tension is the Shroff-Dutt game of one-upmanship, which is dealt with rigorously. We never know which way the crook’s crumble.
Baaghi 2 is a remake of the 2013 Tamil film Ainthu Ainthu Ainthu. But far more sharp in the writing and far better performed by actors who know their game inside-out.
