When Tiger is on the move, kicking, jumping, punching, wielding guns and knives and bombs, Baaghi 2 delivers. It falters when it dives into ‘emotion’, trying to get our Army jawan hero in touch with his softer side. The love story is saggy. The pretty Patani, who debuted with sparkle in M S Dhoni, comes off insipid and out of her depth here. The trouble with a full-on masala film going in search of a plot is evident in the way the film unspools.
The bare bones are borrowed from Telugu thriller Kshanam, but the fillings are all strictly Bollywood: the attempt to create difference gets diluted. After a while, inevitably, all the bang-bang starts feeling familiar, whether it is happening on the streets of Goa, where much of the film is set, or in some jungles, location unspecified, where the long-drawn climax takes place. Tiger is cleverly surrounded by a splendid supporting cast. There’s the fully-in-the-groove Manoj Bajpayee as a sardonic cop; Randeep Hooda as the reefer-smoking hippie undercover agent; and Deepak Dobriyal as a shady-but-good-hearted car dealer with a side business in powder.
They lift the film every time they come on, knowing their place in the pantheon (the hero is on top, everyone else is below, waiting for their dialogue), and shining nevertheless. You wish they had more to do, even Prateik Babbar who returns to the screen after a long gap, and tries too hard for menace as a drug-addled crazy. You wish that this was a real ensemble cast, with equitable sharing rights, because then it would be so much more interesting.
We are left with the invincible hero in the snaky villain’s den, battling one man after another, scything through one attack after another, in his latest desi-Rambo turn. Finally, it all comes down to Tiger, and he burns bright only up to a point. An even bigger sin is in the way the film tries to re-jig Madhuri Dixit’s iconic “Ek Do Teen”: Jacqueline Fernandez, an efficient bumper-and-grinder left to herself, comes on, and our eyes glaze over.
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