Art & Entertainment

Tevar

Despite its occasional flourishes and a basic competence of craft, you end up taking very little back home.

Advertisement

Tevar
info_icon

Starring: Arjun Kapoor, Sonakshi Sinha, Manoj Bajpayee
Directed by Amit Sharma
Rating: **

info_icon

A remake of the Telugu film Okkadu, Tevar proves yet again that Bollywood really should either start looking beyond South hits or learn to contextualise them better for the North.

Tevar does have an interesting new twist in the tale: the hero and heroine are never quite ‘romantic’ for a large stretch of the film. Passion is actually what the villain feels strongly, one-sided though it may be. There’s more than catches the eye. The rawness and rusticity of the setting, the action, the chases, the confrontations and the camerawork are all quite fetching. Some scenes and moments are nicely set up. But scratch the rough attractiveness of the surface and there’s little that is actually fresh and new. The film ends up with all the familiar stereotypical characters and a narrative that is predictable to the core. It’s the reason why, despite its occasional flourishes and a basic competence of craft, you end up taking very little of Tevar back home. In fact, it gets quite tedious and benumbing beyond a certain point.

Advertisement

Baddie Gajender (Manoj) falls for college girl Radhika (Sonakshi), who doesn’t reciprocate his affection. Kabaddi player Pintu (Arjun), ostensibly a combination of Rambo, Terminator and Salman Khan, comes to her rescue. Love comes late to the hero and heroine on the run from the villain, but it eventually does. It just has to in a Hindi film. Things come to a head in the mess of a last quarter. From the villain with a political background to the chirpy sister and the ever-dep­endable group of friends, the characters are like better-written cliches. Better written because some of them—Pintu’s father for instance—do feel genuine. The grime might look good but one wonders why all the films set in north Indian small towns (Agra, Mathura here) are about aggression and seething unrest. Is there nothing more to them? Are there no other stories brewing there? Small-town films seem to be a formula unto themselves, with a licence to showing violence to the exclusion of everything else. In a nutshell, a repository of all that feels irritatingly outdated rather than charmingly old-fashioned. What’s more, there are some things in the film that the rational mind just refuses to accept and wants to majorly nitpick on: how can the hard-to-get US visa, of all things, become such an easy escape from the patriarchal badlands?

Advertisement

Arjun Kapoor is himself: reliably scruffy and shrill and unmoving like a rock. Sonakshi Sinha is what she is in every film—a damsel in distress. Also, like a shuttlecock between two badminton racquets called men. Manoj Bajpayee tries hard to bring life to the proceedings with his villainy, adding some shades of humour to the overwhelming menace. He may make things a trifle more tolerable, but the film still sinks.

Tags

    Advertisement

    Advertisement

    Advertisement

    Advertisement

    Advertisement

    Advertisement