Himmatwala
Synopsis:
Halfway through the movie, Ajay Devgan is literally fighting off a small army of bad guys while wearing this blindingly bright white polyester safari suit that looks like it hasn't seen a washing machine in weeks, and he's just swinging punches and kicking men into piles of hay barrels like it's no big deal at all. But to understand why he's throwing down in a dusty village courtyard, you have to look at how this whole crazy mess started in the first place, way back at the beginning of the movie when we meet his character Ravi, who is this righteous, muscle-bound hero who arrives in a corrupt village to avenge his father's tragic death. You see, the village is completely under the thumb of this horrible, mustache-twirling tyrant played by Mahesh Manjrekar, who frames innocent people and ruins lives just because he can, and Ravi's dad was just an honest man who couldn't take the corruption anymore and ended up falsely accused and driven to suicide. So then, fast forward through twenty years of childhood trauma and growing up away from home, and Ravi is finally back to settle the score, and honestly, the pacing of the setup is so fast that you barely have time to blink before he's already picking fights with the local thugs and making his presence known to the entire corrupt establishment.
The funny thing is, before Ravi can even get properly settled into his mission of pure vengeance, he bumps into the local tyrant's spoiled, super rich, and ridiculously overdressed daughter, played by Tamannaah Bhatia, who spends the first half of the film screaming at him in these high-end, neon-colored lehengas that honestly defy all logic for a rural setting. They start off hating each other with a passion, and she tries to humiliate him at every single turn by setting traps, throwing things, and bringing her goon friends along to pick on him, but he just smirks through all of it and delivers classic dialogue like, "I am the one who will fix this village," right before walking away without a care in the world. Naturally, they fall completely in love because that's just how traditional bollywood movies work, and there are these massive, wildly colorful song and dance sequences thrown in out of nowhere where Tamannaah wears literally ten different costume changes in a single three-minute stretch, and honestly, the sheer volume of sequins in her wardrobe is something that still stays with me to this day.
Right after that big musical number, the plot gets super convoluted with land grabs and forged documents and evil plots involving Paresh Rawal as the comically corrupt temple priest or village elder who is always scheming in the background while sweating profusely under the hot sun. They try to frame Ravi for stealing temple gold, and they kidnap his mother, and they beat up his friends, and honestly, the whole middle section is just a chaotic blur of dramatic shouting matches, slow-motion slaps, and dramatic close-ups of Ajay Devgan narrowing his eyes with pure determination. He doesn't even flinch when twenty guys attack him with sticks, and he just keeps fighting while breaking every piece of wooden furniture in a five-mile radius. It's just wild.
As the story rushes toward its inevitable conclusion, all the subplots crash into each other like a multi-car pileup on a highway, and everybody gathers at the main village square for the ultimate showdown where the bad guys think they finally have the upper hand. Mahesh Manjrekar's character is laughing maniacally, holding a giant whip and threatening everyone, but then Ravi shows up out of nowhere, rips off his jacket to reveal his rippling muscles, and charges right into the crowd of henchmen. Fists fly everywhere, wooden carts get smashed to splinters, and the local villains get tossed into mud puddles one by one while the background score blasts loud trumpets. Ravi finally corners Mahesh Manjrekar's character against a burning tractor, delivers one final brutal punch that sends the villain crashing through a stack of wooden crates, and then he pulls out his dad's old framed photograph, holds it up high in the dusty air, and stands there silently as the credits finally roll on screen.
The tiger fight in the opening act of Himmatwala has this digital sheen on the fur that makes it look less like an actual beast and more like a rejected asset from a mid-budget video game rendered on a five-year-old console. If I'm honest, that kind of lazy digital work sets the tone for everything that follows. Sajid Khan took the 1983 Jeetendra vehicle, a movie that already wasn't exactly towering art to begin with, and decided the best way to honor it was to strip out whatever raw pulp energy made it tolerable on a Friday night VHS rental. You get Ajay Devgan walking in slow motion through clouds of yellow smoke, wearing white pants that defy the dusty rural setting, looking entirely like a man who signed a contract and would rather be literally anywhere else in the entire world.
Devgan isn't doing much here besides leaning against doorways and squinting. He plays Ravi, a man of uncompromising moral rectitude who returns to his village to settle old scores with the local tyrant played with scenery-chewing exhaustion by Mahesh Manjrekar. Manjrekar barks his lines like he is trying to reach the back row of an empty tent theater, sweating through heavy brocade vests while Paresh Rawal stands off to the side, doing his standard comic relief routine which mostly consists of getting slapped by women and making exaggerated double-takes. It is a small thing, but it bugged me how the sound effects team used the exact same cartoon bonk audio cue every single time Rawal takes a hit, right down to the little sliding whistle that follows. You watch actors of genuine caliber like Rawal reduced to repeating bits they mastered in the nineties, and it feels less like a performance and less like acting and more like a museum exhibit of bad habits. Tamannaah Bhatia, meanwhile, is wheeled out scene after scene in increasingly absurd western-cut cowgirl gear that has zero relationship to any decade of rural Indian history, dancing through choreographed numbers where her expression remains remarkably neutral, as if she is silently calculating her grocery list while thirty background dancers leap over hay bales behind her.
The script treats exposition like a physical obstacle it has to sprint past by screaming. Characters walk into rooms and announce their entire personal histories to people who already grew up with them, a clunky shortcut that betrays the desperate pacing of a director who knows his audience is checking their phones. The camera work by Himman Dhamija lacks any sort of spatial coherence. You watch fight scenes where people are thrown through wooden walls, and the reverse angle reveals a completely different set layout with extra doors that weren't there three seconds prior, making the geography of a simple fistfight feel like a magic trick performed by someone who forgot where they put the props. This is the kind of careless craftsmanship that gives modern commercial Hindi movies a bad name among people who remember when masala cinema actually cared about rhythm and payoff. Even the background score, recycled portions of Bappi Lahiri's original compositions mashed together with screechy electronic percussion, hits you over the head with the exact emotional state you are supposed to be feeling, refusing to let a single dramatic pause breathe for even a fraction of a second.
There is an exhausting nostalgia at play here, though it is a nostalgia for a decade of Hindi films that nobody with any taste actually misses. Khan seems to believe that reproducing the loud misogyny and broad caricatures of the eighties counts as paying homage, missing the point that those older movies worked because the performers had a certain unhinged chemistry that covered up the narrative holes. Here, every joke about a fat person or a subservient wife lands with a dull thud, heavy and joyless. It reminds me of watching Sajid Nadiadwala productions from the same era where the colors are cranked up so high in post-production that every single frame looks like a box of detergent spilled across the lens. You sit there waiting for a single moment of genuine surprise, a line reading that doesn't telegraph its punchline three sentences away, but the movie just keeps grinding forward, relentless and empty.
Devgan delivers his final dialogue to Manjrekar while standing under a plastic waterfall that is so clearly hooked up to a municipal garden hose off-screen that you can see the black rubber nozzle shaking behind a fake palm frond. The credits roll immediately after, cutting off the final chord of the song with an abrupt digital fade to black that feels less like a stylistic choice and more like the editor simply panicked and hit save.