Laal Kaptaan, directed by Navdeep Singh, opens to a rainy morning in Shergarh Fort. The year is 1764, and half-a-dozen men are hanging from a tree. This image is central to Laal Kaptaan — the film’s secret, its raison d’être — that will be referenced several times.
A boy, closely connected to this event, grows up to become a man who has no first name, no last name, no family. He is simply called ‘Gosain’ (Saif Ali Khan) — a homeless ascetic — who is skilled at bumping people off. Laal Kaptaan, largely set in Bundelkhand, tells the story of that man.
Laal Kaptaan’s major players, besides him, include the Marathas, the Afghans, and the British. The initial segment of the film — introducing Gosain and a military leader called Rehmat Khan (Manav Vij) — meanders along nicely, making us wonder about the central conflict. Laal Kaptaan’s plot, spanning the past and present, is intricately wound, reluctant to show all its cards at once. Even till the intermission, you haven’t quite figured out the movie, made the subtle connections between the different subplots and character motivations.
Gosain, we soon find out, wants to extract revenge from Rehmat, but we aren’t sure why. Laal Kaptaan does an impressive job of sustaining our initial interest. There are multiple references to a ‘bhoot’ — a ghost wrapped in ash — and we see Gosain, with a painted face, rubbing soil on his face. There are multiple mentions of a son avenging his father. Gosain is a bit of a medieval ‘lone wolf’, a man with no past and no future, who seems to have emerged out of nowhere. Rehmat, on the other hand, can massacre dozens of people without a frown on his face.
But a film needs much more than a dense story and a few intriguing points of engagement to succeed. Laal Kaptaan sees the pair of Singh and dialogue writer Sudeep Sharma reunite after NH10, which was one of the best films of 2015. But the dialogue often lacks the pleasing musicality or the biting wit, which are Sharma’s forte, as evidenced in Sonchiriya earlier this year. Singh also doesn’t find enough ways to make us part of the story, to care for his characters and their maddening desires.
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Few scenes have the affecting and unpredictable quality that a drama like this needs — such as the exchange between the Queen (Simone Singh) and a lower caste woman (Zoya Hussain), where the former forbids the latter to touch her own son, whose father is the Queen’s husband or the Maratha warriors, “Pandharis”, acting like animated pre-teens whenever they see a corpse, as it allows them to steal from the dead. Laal Kaptaan, for the large part, instead slips into a complacent, perfunctory mode, isolating the audiences from its emotional core. This hurts the film, because once you’ve connected the dots, not long after the interval, it becomes progressively less interesting.
It’s also contrived at times. Gosain’s nemeses get the chance to kill him more than once, but they engage him in a conversation instead and, as you expect, he flees at the first opportune moment. Then there are other cliched tropes, such as a subplot centered on deceit; redundant flashbacks; the hero always prevailing at the end, no matter how tricky a situation. Besides, at least two murders look unintentionally comical and unconvincingly dramatic.
Laal Kaptaan does have decent performances – Khan is a feral, convincing presence; Vij effectively distills the psychopathic essence of his character; and Deepak Dobriyal, as the eccentric informer and a vital link connecting disparate subplots, is funny and mysterious enough to evoke constant interest.
But Laal Kaptaan, like its villains, fails to fire when the situation demands it the most.