Saif Ali Khan starrer revenge period drama, directed by NH10 fame Navdeep Singh is the curious case of serving cold dish in old plates.
Director: Navdeep Singh
Cast: Saif Ali Khan, Manav Vij, Deepak Dobariyal, Zoya Hussain, Sonakshi Sinha
Saif Ali Khan, with his brave smart choices, especially in the last two years has become one of those most trustable artists whose projects I really forward to. Teasers of Laal Kaptaan had this intense mystic vibe and everything, including the stellar cast, looked really appealing and exciting. But one hour into the film and you see nothing but slow-paced screenplay with ill-suited dialogues and the film is literally going nowhere, you are ought to get disappointed.
Laal Kaptaan tells the story of a Naga Sadhu (played by Saif Ali Khan) who is chasing a malicious Rehmat Khan (Manav Vij) to inflict a ‘revenge’ upon him and in this gruesome manhunt gets joined by multiple characters who appear and disappear according to their
convenience. Now in spite of being basic in plot all this looked interesting in trailers (and to so some extent I loved how they were introduced in the film) and the film might have worked if makers had given more time on knitting a better plot rather that relying on one major reveal/plot twist for which they dragged this story so painfully long.
The problem with Laal Kaptaan is that everything looks unreal and staged and after a while the narrative come comes back to where it started. And also, when last year the same production gave us a shockingly awesome Tumbbad, it was painful to see ace actors like Khan (and not to forget, the brilliant Deepak Dobariyal) who are trying hard but in vain. You never get the purpose behind their action. People randomly switch sides and tell a story to justify them. And then tell some more. In one of those story-inside-story scenes, the pace suddenly becomes so fast and everything has been explained so hurriedly that you almost lose the track.
Not that this film is completely flawed and what kept me awake were some of the fight
scenes in which the director really awes you. Saif Ali Khan is a visual delight and he really
deserves all the admiration for completely camouflaging himself into this blood-thirsty
bounty hunter but other than that, everything was ‘meh’ as the millennials say it. Also, I don’t know why it’s raining colours in Bollywood every week with Kaptaan being Red and Sky being Pink.
