Baaghi 4 sees Tiger Shroff return as Ronnie, the action hero with enhanced protein shake coursing through his veins. In his latest film, Shroff goes for broke – a bid to save his flailing career, perhaps? Exit the kid-friendly actor and enter the mean-tempered avenger who drives metal rods into skin and sets heads on fire.
Apart from shock value, A Harsha’s 163-minute Hindi movie has little to offer. Shroff has the fitness levels and the martial arts moves needed to carry off the action scenes, but not the ability to play a man so devastated by his loss that he loses all sense of proportion.
Baaghi 4 is based on a story and screenplay by producer Sajid Nadiadwala that closely resembles the Tamil film Ainthu Ainthu Ainthu (2013). Ronnie is involved in a terrible accident and wakes up after a seventh-month-long coma. He insists that his girlfriend Alisha (Harnaaz Sandhu) was also involved in the mishap. Only, there appears to be no trace of Alisha.
Is Alisha a figment of Ronnie’s imagination? The bigger question is, why doesn’t the carnage-friendly villain Chacko (Sanjay Dutt), who has something to do with the situation, dispatch Ronnie when he was lying senseless on a hospital bed?
Ronnie and Chacko are bullet-proof, machete-proof and fire-proof. But Baaghi 4 isn’t idiocy-proof.
After taking forever to kick in (two songs plus a reprise within the first 30 minutes alone), the movie gets down to business. Here too, Baaghi 4 fails to give fans of torture porn the no-holds-barred experience they have paid good money for.
The case of good butcher versus bad butcher has the requisite fountains of fake blood, the single-take massacres, the competitive savagery. But all of this has been seen before, and with greater feeling. Sanjay Dutt, who is perfectly suited for this kind of balderdash, has a couple of over-the-top scenes guaranteed to wake up the snoozers.
The cast includes Upendra Limaye playing a wisecracking Mumbai cop yet again and Saurabh Sachdeva as a peacocking villain yet again. Sonam Bajwa plays a nightclub dancer who tends to Ronnie’s wounds in the hope of eliciting a response, any response, from him.
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