Baadshaho Movie Review: Stylish But Not Substantial Enough

A few years back, Milan Luthria had teamed up with Ajay Devgn and Emraan Hashmi to make the highly entertaining Once Upon A Time In Mumbaai and this year, the trio is back with heist thriller Baadshaho,  But will this movie hijack the box office this weekend? Read on…

Set against the backdrop of the Emergency, the film revolves around Princess Gitanjali (Ileana D’Cruz), whose royal treasury is forcibly appropriated by Army officer Seher Singh (Vidyut Jammwal) on the orders of the Government. Gitanjali ropes in her loyal retainer/lover Bhawani Singh (Devgn) to hijack the armored truck transporting the gold from Rajasthan to New Delhi and this sets the stage for a race against time for Bhawani and his band of bandits Dalia (Hashmi), Guruji (Sanjay Mishra) and Sanjana (Esha Gupta) as they try to recapture the gold.

Devgn and Hashmi, who had impressed us with their intensity and roguish charm respectively, are at it again and the duo has got some of the best dialogues in the film. Between the two, Hashmi shines out as the rakish and fatalist Dalia, but then, Hashmi has played such characters before and he has nothing new to offer in that sense while Devgn unleashes his smoldering eyes and dark intensity with the right amount of restraint. Sanjay Mishra is effective as ever while Jammwal looks dashing enough. Ileana and Esha provide the ‘eye candy’ factor while Sharad Kelkar is utterly wasted in his role.

As for the film itself, Baadshaho has everything that a good thriller needs-macho protagonists, ‘seeti maar’ dialogues, femme fatales and an ostensibly impossible mission. However, having said that, the narrative lacks an ‘edge of the seat’ element, which is the backbone of every good thriller. It is obvious that Milan has focused more on style than substance while helming this film and while the plot had promise and could have been made into a crisp thriller; Baadshaho falls short of expectations. A few twists in the tale do take you by surprise, but the length of the film works against the film. The cinematography is quite decent and the film has a very ‘dusty Western’ look to it, which is accentuated by the landscape of Rajasthan.

This is not to say that the film fails in the ‘masala’ department… but while it has loads of it, Baadshaho is never going to be Bollywood’s answer to The Italian Job or Ocean’s Eleven.