Like his namesake in Rahul Rawail’s excellent film in 1984, this Arjun in Suresh Triveni’s gripping Subedaar is sullenly seething. Arjun is very angry about everything in his immediate and remote surroundings. His equation with his firebrand daughter Shyama (Radhika Madan, who still needs to work on her dialogue delivery) is under pressure, and the only person they both communicate through is Arjun’s best friend Prabhakar, played by the dependably solid Saurav Shukla (another one of those best friends who steals the show from right under the hero’s nose).
This, then, is the interesting set-up for Triveni’s badass actioner where the screen takes time to explode. But when it does, the consequences are cataclysmic, in a way that would make Sunny Deol’s Arjun smile. The endgame between Arjun and the baddies has a toasted-brown, crusty appearance (wonder what Ajay Saxena’s cinematography would look like on the big screen!), almost like a Spaghetti Western with a desi tadka.
It is an interesting hybridized mix of borrowed mayhem and desi greed. Served up with a hospitable delight.
While the cast, especially Anil Kapoor (when he is not bothered about his blow-dried hair being dishevelled), Saurabh Shukla, and Aditya Rawal (as the psychopathic brat Price Bhaiyya), are rock-solid, some of the writing is uneven. The relationship between the ghayal-aur-ghatak protagonist Arjun and the sand mafia navigated by one Babli Didi (played by the ubiquitous Mona Singh in an underwritten part), who runs the local town from jail (quite like Saurav Shukla in the series Bindiya Ke Baahubali), never solidifies into the electric encounter that one expects.
Some of the ‘grief’ encounters towards the end seem to serve only the purpose of broadening the brutal base without really adding to the dramatic tension.
What holds our attention right to the end is the sense of dread that runs right across the narration. Suresh Triveni is admirably adept at augmenting the tension. The early sequence on the rough road between Arjun, his Gypsy van (which is a character in the narration, like the Volkswagen in The Love Bug), and the rowdy Prince and his goons is a marvel of thoughtful construction. No one from Prince’s gang would ever think of peeing on the road after this.
Some of the subsequent savage sojourns seem to miss that bead of sweat on the eyebrow and beat of urgency that made the Spaghetti Westerns so edge-of-the-seat. Also, the entire track about the daughter being harassed in college doesn’t quite add up, except for the one lesson that Arjun learns about parenting: you must always know your child’s shoe size.
For all its flaws, Subedaar is quite an experience. It brims with a righteous brutality, reminding us that a soldier’s fight is never over.
“Yeh Sarhad nahin, shehar hai,” someone reminds Arjun after all hell breaks loose. You could have fooled the one-many-army hero.
The film also speaks of safe spaces for women and children. It touches on some burning issues, but the fire never quite burns up the screen. But it singes the life of the characters in ways that the old-fashioned vendetta films of Dharmendra used to.
