Subedaar Review | Anil Kapoor’s Action Drama Bites Off More Than It Wants To Chew

Directed by Suresh Triveni, the introductory scene in Subedaar is thoroughly disturbing. It begins with two young boys having a ridiculous conversation trying to figure out how people defecate in aeroplanes. Very soon, the tone shifts as one of the boys drowns in a nearby river, only for things to escalate from there as the local errant boy fires protestors at will while making a brass band performer dance to his threatening tunes. This scene is tense, darkly comedic, and the combined effect is nerve-wracking. The set-up is cinematically delicious.

The film positions itself as a gritty heartland action drama set against the menace of the sand mafia somewhere in Madhya Pradesh. It promises social churn, corruption and grief, amidst the backdrop of a fractured father–daughter bond. However, what Subedaar ultimately delivers is something far more familiar: repressed masculinity, a deeply confused display of feminine strength and using the oppressed’s trauma merely as a springboard to build up the hero. It seems as if everyone in mainstream Hindi cinema—whether on OTT or in theatrical releases—currently seems compelled to tell the same story. Even when they promise to challenge norms, they wriggle away.

Subedaar has plenty of familiar motifs. There are visual and tonal echoes of Sonchiriya (2019) and Gangs of Wasseypur (2012) in the introductory stretch. There is the dusty, yellow-tinged hinterland; the downtrodden whose trauma sets up the narrative, only for them to be promptly sidelined fifteen minutes in; there are the folk singers and rustic ballads signalling authentic indie gravitas; the hollow, tormented eyes of the abused and tortured. And then, the story quickly narrows into something else. Inevitably, there is the hero, who must rise from smouldering silence to demonstrate that he can still throw a punch, draw blood and defeat fifty armed men barehanded.

Anil Kapoor plays the titular Subedaar Arjun Maurya, a retired soldier struggling to adapt to civilian life. Unusually reticent, he keeps his head down for most of the first half, fully aware that the world around him is lawless and corrupt. He endures the criminals circling his life only until they cross a line and begin tampering with his cherished gypsy car, a memory of his late wife. That is his trigger! A car.

Kapoor is a fine actor. His face can register bruised pride and contained fury at the same time. But the film is far more interested in packaging the 69-year-old Hindi cinema veteran as a seasoned warrior than what it promised as its core subject. From the midway point onward, the story becomes entirely about constructing his larger-than-life image as an action hero. The arc of the everyday man who has tolerated enough does not unfold coherently because here he does not engage meaningfully with the oppressed for most of the film. His rebellion is personal, not political.

Radhika Madan plays Shyama, Arjun’s daughter, with admirable fierceness. She has presence and controlled volatility. Yet, she too is confined to a trope. She embodies the now-standard cinematic “strong woman”—one who must fend off rapists and harassers alone to prove her mettle. Her arc is grim and escalating. She confronts the man who keeps sending her obscene videos to get a recorded confession. To silence her, he threatens her with an acid attack and then kidnapping with the intent to gang-rape and murder. The violence directed at her is extreme, but her character is given little emotional interiority beyond endurance and retaliation.

Arjun and Shyama battle their antagonists, yet they barely speak to one another. The father and daughter operate in parallel silos of rage. Their eventual narrative convergence is forced and provides no emotional catharsis.

Aditya Rawal, as the entitled little gremlin Prince, is the film’s most memorable presence. Prince is Mona Singh’s Babli Didi’s illegitimate stepbrother. He has a strange emiction-humiliation kink and the catchphrase “big enjoy”. Rawal commits fully to the repulsive character, lending him a disturbing vitality.

Singh’s Babli Didi, a notorious sand mafia leader running operations from prison, is built up as the main antagonist. She commands her gang through her lieutenant Softy (played by Faisal Malik, familiar to many as Prahlad Cha from Panchayat). Yet for all the huff-and-puff, Babli Didi, like the film, does not live up to the promise. Nonetheless, Singh—who is currently on a winning streak in shows like Made in Heaven (2023), The Ba***ds of Bollywood (2025), Happy Patel: Khatarnak Jasoos (2026) and Kohrra 2 (2026)—impresses with whatever she gets to do.

Saurabh Shukla, as Arjun’s friend Prabhakar, is underused. A few cameos surface but generate little narrative or emotional impact.

The film is structured in stylistic “chapters”—from “Birthday” to “Anger” to an ending labelled as “Beginning,” a clear nod to sequel ambitions. But ultimately, Subedaar bites off more than it wants to chew—not can, but wants. It invokes an urgent and dangerous issue—the sand mafia’s stranglehold over parts of India—yet shows little real interest in interrogating it. The systemic violence becomes a backdrop for a more marketable spectacle: hypermasculine fury.

The treatment of masculinity and feminine strength here is particularly telling. Strength, for both Arjun and Shyama, is read almost exclusively in terms of violence. Subedaar recalls Daldal, Triveni’s recent series starring Bhumi Pednekar, in a few strange ways. In that show, too, the protagonist dreams of violence against those who provoke her and there is a muddled reading on gender. Both projects, ultimately, take on complex issues without fully understanding them and make a weird mess of it all.