In the hit Amazon series Reacher, Alan Ritchson a retired military officer cleans out a small dusty town of all its surplus filth. In Jaat, Sunny Deol does the same.
So much for originality.
Don’t get me wrong. I enjoyed the breakneck brutality of this juggernaut of a film, to a point. A lot of the choreographed mayhem hits home largely for Mr Deol, who is to cinematic empowerment and what China is to global politics.
Not only does he make a credible one-man army in Jaat, but he is also very funny when he is allowed to be. Like for instance, his entire war against the evil forces (Randeep Hooda, Vineet Kumar, and other unidentifiable hoodlums) hinges on one man not saying sorry for messing up his meal.
That spilt sambar at the roadside dhaba eventuates in gallons of spilt blood.
Shove means never having to say you are sorry. At least not if you want to see Deol take on the goons with a rigour that makes Gadar go into a shudder.
The ongoing say-sorry joke is the backbone of this neatly messy mob-swings cut sharply and dexterously. These are men who live by the sickle and die by it. The writers, director, and our Sunny Paaji seem to be part of a plan to teach the goons a lesson they are unlikely to forget.
I am not too sure that noble intentions travel all the way from paper to posterity. Many times, I found the action more a pretext to make stylized violence look appealing rather than a necessary evil. Nonetheless, the action is enjoyable while it lasts. No one but Sunny Deol could pull the ceiling fan off the roof and use it as a weapon against corruption.
It is when the plot weaponizes women as a tool of subverted empowerment that this homage to hefty mayhem begins to lose its sting. The entire subplot about Saiyami Kher and her cop-sisters storming into the villain’s citadel and, being stripped of their power and clothes, and being locked up like cattle seems awfully dodgy in its intention.
What are the director and his writers trying to say? That women should not try to behave like men, that they should remain within their maryada? In other words, women should avoid physically gruelling jobs, especially those dealing with toxic men.
The other woman, Bharathi (Regina Cassandra), is a woman in a man’s world. She enjoys beheading adversaries as much as her husband, Ranatunga (Randeep Hooda). Together, the husband and wife terrorize a slew of coastal villages.
It won’t be an exaggeration to say the entire second-half of the storytelling is at sea, in more ways than one, with characters piling up in a melodramatic mound, both dead and alive. Striding smoothly across the sanguinary skyline is Sunny Deol, convincing in his commitment to set things right as only he can. Randeep Hooda as the antagonist is impressive in parts, though overall, his character looks more annoyed than intimidating.
The rest of the vast cast is plainly functional, entering and exiting to enhance the volume of Sunny Paaji’s one-line mission to get a sorry out of his idli-sambar spillers until the battle lines expand not so exponentially. Urvashi Rautela’s item song hits the bottom-most level of populism. By the time she comes on, Deol’s high-octane action has kicked in so wholeheartedly the distraction seem unpardonable.
What I noticed while staying invested in Gopichand Malineni’s stylized actioner is the pleasure it takes in shooting the larger-than-life hero as a saviour. Jaat is a full-on action romp sone with enough swag to make it fun even if the head count gets unnecessarily amplified.
