The most comforting and annoying thing about S. Shankar’s Hindustani 2, is how familiar it all feels.
Like its predecessor (released in 1996) where Kamal Haasan played both the honest father and the pragmatic and pliant son, the filmmaking language is still pointedly unsubtle and within the mainstream framework.
Bureaucrats are still accepting bribes in duffle bags and grocery totes, fugitive billionaires split their time between the Bolivian salt flats and expensive yachts, some industrialists own mansions made of literal gold, while some have bought real estate on Mars. All privileged folk are evil and unrepentant, and seem to be relishing their amoral and depraved existence. The oppressed folk are only a sum of their tragedies in scene after scene. For all their brimming idealism and youthful sizzle, the social media activist generation are shown to be extremely gullible and short-sighted. I get what the director is getting at, but if the characters weren’t so caricatured, I might have even attempted to invest in them.
One thing that will and should severely affect us while watching Hindustani 2, compared to the first part, is a crucial peoples’ movement. The India Against Corruption (IAC) movement in 2011, where people took to the streets for the passing of a Lokpal bill, almost played out like visuals from a Shankar film. The general public gathered and voiced their dissent against a severely compromised system, and several ‘selfless leaders’ appeared out of thin air. I even have vague memories of circulated videos from Arvind Kejriwal’s first Delhi campaign for his newly-formed Aam Aadmi Party cut to the score of Nayak (2001) – another Shankar film. It had a noticeable impact on the anti-incumbency sentiment around the nation.
In the last decade, we’ve seen many of these ‘beacons of integrity’ flounder in the dark, act out of desperation, mysteriously disappear or stay strategically silent amidst increasing corruption, fanning the flames of dozens of conspiracy theories. While watching the first film, we did not mind a single vigilante’s judgement calls as he went around ‘cleaning the system’. However, no one would blame the audience for viewing Senapathi (Kamal Haasan) more cynically today, questioning his motives, wrestling with his death sentences – as he lectures the public on selflessness and what needs to be done for the ‘greater good’.
Frankly, it’s a cracker of an idea – showing a vigilante who first inspires his fellow countrymen, and later sees them brand him an enemy of the state. Unfortunately, this idea comes around in the last half an hour of this opus spanning nearly three hours. By then, Shankar has bludgeoned his audience with rehashed versions of his earlier films.
Chitra Aravind (Siddharth) runs a YouTube channel with three friends (they call themselves ‘barking dogs’ – not sure if it’s too self-aware or trying too hard) where they highlight the plight of the common folk. Whether it’s about overflowing landfills, corrupt government officials or loan sharks harassing and threatening education loan defaulters from low-income backgrounds. Despite their keen interest, the friends realise that there’s only so much ‘change’ they can bring about on social media.
A still from Hindustani 2.
They start a hashtag #ComeBackIndian – a call for Senapathi to return to his country, after he’s shown to have settled abroad at the end of the first film. Turns out, he’s living in Taipei – after being spotted in a grocery store by someone who looks like a graduate student. We’re told Senapathi is a “most wanted” terrorist in India, and while the national security officials seem to be asleep at their jobs, a graduate student locates the almost centenarian vigilante. By now, Senapathi has become a mix of Master Shifu and Oogway, teaching the ancient Indian martial art of Varma Kalai.
Hindustani 2 coasts along on its familiarity for the first two and a half hours – bringing us the systemic rot in our bureaucracy, something most Shankar films have done for more than three decades. There’s a slight twist here though. Given the logistical challenge of solving corruption in every household, Senapathi tells the common folk to take a good look at their own family members, and report any wrongdoing. This includes our four social media activists. It’s a stunning scheme – almost Orwellian – in the way we’re expected to watch those around us, and report on them if we ever see them falling out of line. The film makes some stellar assumptions to make this comprehensible for viewers: most citizens of this country are honest and upright and will not report anyone out of petty jealousy or in bad faith, most corrupt officials wear their dishonesty on their sleeve, Senapathi is the equivalent of a one-person fair state – who will unemotionally serve justice to only wrongdoers. I found it all to be a bit of a stretch, despite the long rope we often afford a Shankar fantasy.
Senapathi, who uses his gravelly voice to pronounce death sentences, goes on monologues before killing every industrialist. There’s a zero-gravity sequence here, which might just be the most wasteful use of a set-piece since Shah Rukh Khan’s Zero (2018). I did laugh out loud after seeing Yograj Singh (of all people) appear in a nothing role as the head of security for a billionaire. Also, Piyush Mishra playing a greedy capitalist (he recently admitted to his stark disillusionment with the left politics in a recent interview, and appeared in a film titled Jahangir National University), slobbering through the aforementioned zero-gravity scene.
Siddharth, who played a similar character in his breakout Hindi performance in Rang De Basanti (2004) almost exactly two decades ago, appears silly in more than one scene. He looks completely transfixed while listening to Senapathi – never once questioning any of his ‘lessons’. For an actor who is far more eloquent in real life, the character seems to have the earnestness of a teenager, which never quite fits with Siddharth’s physicality.
A still from Hindustani 2.
Maybe a younger actor would have sold the naivete better. Haasan, even under dozens of layers of prosthetics, is one of the most charismatic actors to have adorned our screens, something he proved only two weeks ago in Kalki 2898 AD. There’s a pre-interval sequence he carries while speaking chaste Gujarati, one of the more ambitious sequences.
Into the film’s final half hour I was about to give up, and then Shankar wove some of his old magic. A monocycle shows up and Senapathi boards it to jet-set through the roads of Chennai, and the metro line. It’s the only cool set-piece in a film that never rises above its excesses. Like the rest of Hindustani 2, even this chase goes on longer than it should. The film ends with mobs chasing Senapathi for turning in their loved ones, fully unaware and unprepared to make any sacrifices while walking the path of righteousness. The audience in my theatre were giggling through the scene. Maybe they dismissed it as a filmy fantasy in a Shankar film. Or maybe they can’t be taught to look within. No matter how patronising a film’s tone, or how big a star at the centre of it all.
