‘Jaat’ review: Sorry tale of southbound Sunny

Will Sunny Deol—or the makers of any film starring him—ever move past the overused ‘Yeh dhai kilo ka haath’ (this two and a half kilo hand) line of dialogue from the 1993 film Damini? Clearly not, because writer-director Gopichand Malineni revives it once again it as a front-bencher-pleasing proclamation in the Hindi language action drama Jaat, headlined by Deol. Famed in the North, Deol’s character Baldev Pratap Singh declares that it is now time the south gets acquainted with his legendary and destructive hand.

Having worked predominantly in the Telugu film industry, Malineni approaches his Hindi debut with a by-the-numbers attempt at a pan-Indian film, casting actors familiar to Marathi, Hindi, Telugu, and Tamil audiences. Leading the charge is Deol’s Baldev, who makes a rambunctious entrance as the only man in khaki amid a sea of saffron-clad sadhus and devotees chanting Jai Shri Ram while boarding a train to Ayodhya. But an unscheduled stop in the middle of nowhere, Andhra Pradesh, and a plate of hot idlis leads Baldev—the Jaat—into direct conflict with the ridiculously evil, violent, and greedy badman Ranatunga (Randeep Hooda). What begins as a simple request for an apology over a spilled plate of idlis quickly escalates into an all-out war, as Baldev becomes a one-man army battling Ranatunga’s criminal empire.

Ranatunga has terrorised the coastal belt of Andhra Pradesh for years, building an empire on an ever-growing head-count, quite literally. His henchmen, including his brother Somulu (Vineet Kumar Singh) and his wife Bharathi (Regina Cassandra) decapitate anyone who dares to defy them. But Baldev is determined to dismantle Ranatunga and Somulu’s reign of terror.

Malineni makes full use of the indulgent 153-minute runtime to build Ranatunga’s backstory, stretching from war-torn jungles in Sri Lanka in 2009 to his rise in Andhra Pradesh. His growing menace reaches the corridors of power in New Delhi, prompting the dispatch of a CBI officer to investigate the ground reality. Layered into the narrative are crimes against women—including female police officers—political corruption, and a compromised local police force.

Sexism cannot be separated from the narrative trope and the women are shown as whimpering and weak. If the writers wanted to portray the women police officers, led by Vijaylakshmi (Saiyami Kher) as braver than their male counterparts, then why strip them of their honour and then have a Baldev rescue these cowering women?

The film's centrepiece—the action—is disappointingly unimaginative. Deol mostly stands or sits in one spot as waves of thugs attack him one by one, only to be instantly dispatched by the infamous ‘two-and-a-half kilo hand’, using whatever weapon is within reach. This repetitive, lazy choreography becomes tiresome after the third or fourth iteration.

Rishi Punjabi’s cinematography, Navin Nooli’s editing, and Avinash Kolla’s production design add visual appeal, but it’s not enough to distract from the jumbled accents—Zarina Wahab, Saiyami Kher, and Makrand Deshpande sound like the Mumbai-based actors they are, without any effort to adapt their speech to match their Andhra Pradesh-based characters. There’s even a clandestine meeting in Davos, where a global plot is hatched. Following which, Ranatunga bulldozes his way through coastal villages, committing one large-scale decapitation after another—all underscored by thunderous music and sound effects.

Deol gets plenty of grandstanding dialogue such as ‘I am a farmer and a jaat and we are bonded by this land—Mother Earth’. Yet his soft-spoken dialogue delivery and suitability to playing an older hero, combined with Hooda’s performance as a chilling antagonist, aren’t strong enough to carry the weight of loud, crude, brutal and, ultimately, puffed up mess.

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