‘Bhaiyya Ji’ movie review: Manoj Bajpayee burns bright in this toothless revenge saga

After setting the stage for a bombastic entertainer, Apoorv Singh Karki’s experiment to put two seasoned actors in the star zone fizzles out

A cross between Bhojpuri and South Indian masala movies, Bhaiyya Ji is a different beast for popular Hindi cinema. It seems the makers seek to reach out to the single-screen audience in the Hindi heartland who are missing their desi hero and his rustic milieu in the multiplexes. It is also a rare action drama where both the hero and the villain are essayed by actors who love to underplay and revel in bringing out the subtleties of their characters. After reveling in realism where they make their silence heard, Manoj Bajpayee and Suvinder Vicky seem to have walked into the set of a Salman Khan actioner this week, with their toolkits of method acting.

Nothing wrong in it and one was keen to see how Bajpayee, known to do a lot of digging to realise his characters, would literally wield the spade to bludgeon his opponents. Director and co-writer Apoorv Singh Karki, who worked with Bajpayee on courtroom drama Sirf Ek Bandaa Kaafi Hai, sets up the stage for a revenge saga this time but after dressing up the age-old premise and talented players, this Badle Ki Aag fizzles out.

The intentions are loud and clear but the outcome is disappointing because Karki who showed immense promise in his debut feature falters in putting his vision on the final print. Based on the internecine battles between Brahmin and Rajput satraps in Bihar and eastern parts of Uttar Pradesh, Ram Charan (Manoj Bajpayee) alias Bhaiyya Ji has to come out of self-imposed retirement when his stepbrother Bhola is killed by the son (Jatin Goswami) of Chandra Bhan Singh (Suvinder Vicky) after an ego tussle takes an ugly shape.

After spelling out the premise, the narrative takes a predictable shape. An archetypal mother seeking an eye for an eye, a would-be wife (Zoya Hussain) who can pull the trigger, a slimy police officer (Vipin Sharma) who shifts sides, and so on. The problem is that Karki is not sure of the tone. In his bid to give the commercial tropes a somewhat realistic touch, the mayhem turns into a mishmash. Revenge drama runs on a regular supply of genuine emotion but here it runs dry after the first injection. The dialogue-baazi and the bombast that pull you in in the first fifteen minutes gradually start sounding hollow. Moreover, the colour, the charisma, and the claptrap that the film promises reduce to caricature and cacophony. Then there are issues with editing and pacing and in the second half the storytelling starts feeling patchy, repetitive, and disjointed.

Without the meat, Bajpayee cuts a sorry figure. The intensity he carries on his face is undone by the insanity that spills around him on the screen. You want to see Bhaiyya Ji jostle for pride but not in the space Karki has provided him. The action choreography is not seamlessly built into the narrative as the intrinsic logic doesn’t hold. It seems we are watching a series of ‘entry’ scenes of Bhaiyya Ji with some inane rhetoric thrown in between. The romantic angle between Bajpayee and Zoya remains unexplored and the Bhojpuri songs lack the recall value. Suvinder Vicky does get a hang of the dialect and the mood and along with Vipin Sharma provides some sparks but they are not good enough to light up the embers.

Bhaiyya Ji is currently running in theatres