Sooryavanshi review: A decent movie to draw audience back to the cinemas

Rohit Shetty makes sure every nuance goes nuclear in his movies and his latest, Sooryavanshi, is no different. Akshay Kumar plays the titular role of an Anti-Terrorism Squad officer entrusted with the responsibility of locating 600 kg of RDX somewhere buried in Mumbai and is about to be used by the Lashkar to unleash an attack of a magnitude that the city is yet to witness.

Predictably, the violence is hootingly explicit and gravity defying. Jomon T John’s thrilling camera movements make sure we relish the four-wheelers getting blown up or turning turtle. But behind this veneer of slickly shot action sequences we have a belabored plot that goes all over the place.

Shetty is in his elements during the action parts but he builds up his narrative with too much jingoism. However, Akshay Kumar keeps the proceedings engaging with his no nonsense and strangely satisfying turn as DCP Veer Sooryavanshi. He isn’t over the top like the other policemen of the Rohit Shetty universe and the histrionics barely get jarring on one’s senses and his controlled intensity is something to marvel at. Katrina Kaif sleepwalks through her part as the estranged wife who gives up on her honest husband and moves to Australia. However, she deserves a special mention for lighting up the big screen for her bewitchingly bonkers dance moves in ‘Tip Tip Barsa Paani’.

Sooryavanshi is packed to the rafters with baddies with malevolent intentions of reducing Mumbai into a giant pile of rubble. The villains thrown at our faces like howling rain include Jackie Shroff, Sikandar Kher, Gulshan Grover, Abhimanyu Singh. The movie talks at length about the sleeper cells in Mumbai that are waiting for the go ahead to unleash terror. We get a lot of back stories on 1993 serial blasts and about the RDX buried in the bowels of the megapolis. Javed Jafferi is a positive surprise in the movie as a senior officer who puts Veer through the motions. Unlike the goofy characters he’s associated with, Jafferi turns in an earnest performance as a police officer determined to end the scourge of terrorism in India.

Shetty gets some things very right. A chase sequence on Bangkok’s streets between Veer and Sikandar Kher is brilliantly conceived. The movie’s intensity increases manifold in the second half when Ajay Devgn and Ranveer Singh make clapworthy extended cameos as Singham and Simmba, respectively. The climactic fight where things are blown into smithereens by the three policemen is well worth the price of the ticket. Humour has never been Shetty’s forte but he tries hard and the audience will cringe harder at all the meta references of the antics of the police universe of Rohit Shetty.

Despite the movie’s questionable politics, it was well worth the 18-month wait for the producers who have a proper post-Covid pan-India hit. That makes one wonder how this movie is minting money despite the sanctimonious lectures its protagonist delivers. Unbeknownst to him, Shetty made a movie for the express purpose of drawing audience back to the cinemas amid a pandemic. The entire first half is buried in exposition on how the sleeper cells came about to be and the dramatis personae. Some of the scenes won’t be new to anyone who watched Season 1 of Family Man and Akshay Kumar’s 2015 movie Baby. However, Shetty tops up the content with his inimitable signature style of wham bang action.

Sooryavanshi is not a perfect movie but in terms of getting the audience re-acquainted with the practice of going to the cinema, this headlong morality tale on India’s social fabric will do for now.

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