On the Eve of the release of Singham Again we revisit the first Singham movie in 2011!
This is a praise-Vardi effort even now! When Rohit Shetty directed Singham in 2011, he had no idea what he was getting into. The first Singham film was meant to be a one-off project. A remake of a Tamil film of the same name, Singham, is still a load of fun.
Devgan, with or without the gun, takes his job as a lawfully dreaded crusader very seriously. And we take him seriously: Devgan is an actor with customized inbuilt gravitas. Now, if Akshay Kumar were to play Singham, an element of humour would have crept in willy nilly, as it did when Akshay entered Shetty’s cop universe with Sooryavansham.
Devgan always means business. Even if he cracks a joke, he doesn’t find it funny himself. In Singham, Devgn plays the one-man army. He invests the clichéd Khaki-clad role with a Maharashtrian cultural specificity, which allows him the leeway to get verbally regional without losing a pan-India flavour.
Devgn isn’t the kind of actor who needs to scream to make himself heard. He effectually offsets Prakash Raj’s theatrical villainy bordering on big time hamming. Devgan brings a reckless inevitability into every blow that he delivers on the goons.
Almost the entire cast, barring Prakash Raj and Devgan’s uninteresting love interest(Kajal Aggarwal), is Marathi. This automatically confers a sustainable energy to the narrative. Of course, the Angry Young(?) hero and the cars blow up, sometimes simultaneously. However, the pyrotechnics don’t seem put-on, as they did subsequently.
Watching the film now twelve years after it was first released, Singham seems the most unselfconscious segment of the feel-skewed franchise. Action director Jai Singh Nijjar’s fighting- tricks are entertaining and humorous.
The fights don’t take themselves seriously. However the sermons on a need for integrity in the civil services seem like unwanted concessions to self-importance in a film that seems to revel in a kind of free-floating message on how to stay clean in a cesspool of corruption.
Yup, Rohit Shetty packs in a punch in Singham. It remains to be seen if Singham Returns achieves the same level of connectivity with the audience.
