One vigilante versus many dirty vardis

What are the prerequisites to being a good Bollywood vigilante around whom audiences and the box-office can rally?

Though we have had some vigilante bhootsbhootnis, even pissed off nagins, the most common variety used in these genre movies is a hyper-hetero man.

The Vigi, as we should call him, must nurture a decent degree of insomnia so that he can strike targets in the safety of the night. Thus, red eyes, flared nostrils, singleminded focus and an IQ to match.

Thus, the loud, rousing Shiva chant Satyameva Jayate uses rather generously, starting with when a matka full of ashes turns up at the doorstep of a police thana. It’s to announce that we’ve been invited to a dance of death, so get onto the edge of your seats, please.

Satyameva Jayate, written and directed by Milap Milan Zaveri, tells the story of two men — Shiv (John Abraham) and Shivansh (Manoj Bajpayee).

One is some sort of an artist who throws violent, charcoal strokes on white paper to create screaming faces. He also stalks and immolates evil. The other is a cop who announces his modus operandi in a conversation to his daughter while fishing.

I dig big machlis, not small fry, he says. But as he’s explaining how he gets to them, dangling at the end of his fishing rod is a frail, irritated fish, sealing his fate in this vigilante versus vardi game. Following the arrival of the courier of a cop’s ashes, there’s a lot of besti of Mumbai police in newspapers and on TV shows. So police commissioner summons the akalmand and immandar officer to head the manhunt because corrupt cops are being targeted, and there are too many of them. All the killings are in a very jingo la la mode. The national flag is summoned often to sway to rousing chants and the clanking of temple bells, to suggest to us that Vigi is fighting some sort of dharam yudha. He is helping some people, sure, but he is scalping these cretins to reach the top to settle a very personal score.

So when we buy tickets to vigilante films, it is so that we can be an apprentice walking behind the master. So that, at least for the duration of the film, we go through the full range of emotions — anger, joy, love, sadness, catharsis, tears — before reaching calming closure. Projection, melodrama is, of course, a lesser form of acting. But it is tough to do. Check it out for yourself in Satyameva Jayate where Manoj Bajpayee, one of Bollywood’s finest, is called upon for some emotional exaggeration.

While he crackles in scenes where he’s assigned whistle-worthy dialogue — Rokoonga bhi, thokoonga bhi — but repartee don’t kill nobody. Satyameva Jayate’s plot is twisted to hide some nice surprises, and its killing scenes, though daffy, are bloody and have enough filmy drama to keep us engaged. — SS