Bholaa movie review: Ajay Devgn's Kaithi remake is slower and louder than the original

Bholaa has consciously corrected the marginalisation of women in Kaithi and made other interesting tweaks. Sadly, this is not enough to overshadow the noise, the gore and the laughable sight of a wild beast cowering in the presence of Ajay Devgn.



Cast: Ajay Devgn, Tabu, Deepak Dobriyal, Gajraj Rao, Sanjay Mishra, Amir Khan, Vineet Kumar, Cameo: Amala Paul

Director: Ajay Devgn

Language: Hindi

As the Hindi film industry has struggled with a bankruptcy of imagination during the pandemic, it has resorted to remaking southern Indian hits for salvation. Directors, writers and producers have messed up even on this front, by either mindlessly cloning the originals (e.g. Vikram Vedha) or, what’s worse, diluting their politics for fear of angering the establishment (e.g. Milli). One film stands out from this crowd as an intelligent adaptation, not a Xerox: Abhishek Pathak’s Drishyam 2 starring Ajay Devgn and Tabu. Since the new Hindi film in theatres this week – Bholaa, a revisitation of writer-director Lokesh Kanagaraj’s Tamil blockbuster Kaithi – stars and is directed by Devgn, it is natural to be hopeful. The happy news is that Devgn and the writers of the adapted screenplay (Ankush Singh, Aamil Keeyan Khan, Shriidhar Rajyash Dubey and Sandeep Kewlani) have indeed made some interesting changes in their version of Kaithi. The unfortunate news is that it’s just not enough.

The story remains the same, transposed to north India. In Bholaa, the UP Police capture a huge cache of cocaine and thus become the target of dangerous gangsters. Soon after, all the police personnel present at a party, except SP Diana Joseph (Tabu), consume alcohol. As the men are knocked out one by one, Diana realises their drinks contained a drug. She is injured from an encounter with criminals and therefore needs help to get her colleagues to a hospital in addition to protecting the distant police station where she had hidden the seized contraband. For this she turns to a recently released convict who is on the premises, the mysterious Bholaa (Ajay Devgn). He agrees, after some bullying and emotional blackmail, to drive a truck carrying the unconscious men through the night, navigated by a chap called Kadchi (Amir Khan).

All we know about Bholaa at that point is that the first thing he intended to do with his freedom was visit his little daughter who has been living in an orphanage. Diana and Bholaa’s truck is intercepted along the way by several raging outlaws who have been alerted by Ashwathama a.k.a. Ashu (Deepak Dobriyal), a leader of the gang whose cocaine was taken by the police.

The most noticeable revision wrought by Team Bholaa in their take on Kaithi is the inclusion of Diana. Kaithi was suspenseful when it was focused purely on the primary characters and their allies fighting off ruthless crooks, but it took the marginalisation of women to a shocking extreme by featuring not a single primary or even secondary female character in its storyline. Diana in that film was a man called Bejoy. By consciously correcting this aspect of the script, the writers of Bholaa reveal themselves to be more thoughtful than the entirety of the film might suggest. The fact that this woman has a Christian name, and her religious identity is normalised instead of being underlined, is also noteworthy in a Hindi film industry that has for long scored poorly in the matter of minority representation.

Bholaa comes in the post-2014 era when a steady stream of Hindi films have sought to villainise Muslims, while the Christian minority, largely ignored for decades by Hindi cinema after earlier decades of stereotyping, has been unexpectedly revived in a trickle of recent films, perhaps most prominently in the person of a terrorist (Jim from Pathaan) and a sexually promiscuous blackmailer (Monica from Monica, O My Darling). Diana is among a handful of pleasant surprises in the area of diversity and cultural heterogeneity that Bholaa throws up.

Having done some things so right, Devgn and his crew get so much else so wrong that they completely wreck the film.

Kaithi was OTT to the extent that commercial cinema, especially mainstream Indian cinema, tends to be when it serves up an omnipotent hero, but its main plot nevertheless stayed engaging till the end. Bholaa is so over-the-top, its volume so high and music so manipulative, that by the second half its loudness becomes unbearable. Kaithi’s portrayal of the protagonist’s longing for his daughter was maudlin, Bholaa stretches the heartstrings to breaking point.

The death knell for this film’s appeal though is the slowing down of the pace in comparison with Kaithi, particularly in the first half, and the use of 3D, which is a distraction rather than elevating the experience. Even where the visuals are impressive, they are drowned out by the deafening, overwhelming sound post-interval.

Initially, Bholaa rolls along quite well as it establishes its characters. This is largely because of a high-adrenaline guns-and-speeding-vehicles sequence of the sort that is usually reserved for major male stars in India, this one toplined by Tabu looking so cool in action mode that my new fantasy is to see a gangsta drama in which she is part of a criminal squad comprising Taapsee Pannu and Deepika Padukone, led by Vidya Balan as their evil mastermind.

The space given to Tabu’s Diana in Bholaa is quickly offset though by the crude choreography during a song and dance segment in Ashu’s den in which a sparsely clad woman moves rhythmically with a lascivious partner. Please note that a certain kind of Indian film will still not show actual sex on screen, but has no qualms about persisting with what is called an “item number”, which, in the case of Paan dukaniya in Bholaa involves a woman inside a horizontally placed drum thrusting the lower half of her body in and out of the container, swinging herself back and forth as a lecherous Ashu holds her by the calf and creepily stares up her legs, his own body placed between them just so. It’s laughable and crass rolled in one.

This intrusion aside, the actual downhill slide in Bholaa begins later when a group of villains bar Diana and Bholaa’s road trip. One set of men in this horde wear only shorts on their muscular, oiled-up bodies, while the other is accompanied by a leopard that cowers and then flees at the sight of Bholaa. I am serious. To this film must go the credit of coming up with a scene that closely rivals Sunny Deol’s handpump-uprooting stunt in Gadar and Pakistan’s security forces running away on hearing him roar. Next in Bholaa, a snarling goonda is forced to give his shirt to Bholaa and he whimpers while covering his nipples in shame.

From here on, everything gradually becomes a blur. A lone policeman called Angad Yadav (Sanjay Mishra) and a group of students struggle to protect the police station that Diana is so desperate to reach, but their efforts do not generate the tension that Lokesh Kanagaraj built up in the same scenario in Kaithi. Ashu has a brother called Nithari whose name floats around like so many others whose significance I didn’t feel inclined to decipher. Among them is a Machiavellian background figure called Devraj Subramaniam played by Gajraj Rao doing his interpretation of a Tamilian accent that is, thankfully, not caricaturish as we have seen in Hindi films of an era gone by. Devraj and sundry antagonists wander in and out of the plot.

When Nithari is finally unveiled after much talk about how lethal he is, his personality turns out to be a whisper in comparison with the hype. This for me was Kaithi’s undoing too, along with the hero’s background that was as much of a damp squib in the original as it is in Bholaa.

The hero’s name in this film is obviously an invocation of Bholenath, Lord Shiva, the most fascinating deity in the Hindu pantheon. There is no depth in the Shiva reference though, it is simply slapped on because because. Lest we miss the point, Bholaa repeatedly smears ash on his forehead, a giant statue of Shiva is visible for a considerable length of time near him, and in the film’s most gruesome scene, he takes up a trishul.

That was the last straw for me. I have a high tolerance level for violence on screen, but seeing men being impaled on or stabbed with a trident from all angles for endless minutes, and a shot of a man’s face being pierced with this weapon is more than I can take.

Kaithi had something to offer even a viewer who prefers noiseless, understated cinema, but Bholaa kills that potential by taking the pace of the Tamil film down by several notches and revving up the noise. I don’t have the heart to write off this team though. Not after the unanticipated pleasure of hearing the phrase Aaraaro aariraaro – so familiar from lullabies in southern India – woven into this soundtrack. It is rare for a Hindi film to acknowledge the existence of an India beyond the Hindi belt and Mumbai, or to make cultural references to other regions, unless it is to stereotype, sermonise or get a laugh. Clearly then, the people who created Bholaa are not an unthinking lot. The question is: what on earth were they thinking when they reduced their film to a ear-splitting, thundering mess?