Baaghi 2

Yes, Tiger Shroff has worked at everything here. Yes, he has managed to shed the chikna tag by somehow and anyhow growing some amount of facial hair. Yes, his body shames even the legendary Adonis and his abs are packed with tougher and unrelenting muscles than any other Bollywood star. And yes, he is in the middle of action — extreme, intense, prolonged and unimaginably well-choreographed action that gives this film its life and bread.

But Baaghi 2 still does not go the whole hog. It falters. It picks up, and then falters again. Till the time Tiger is fighting all the goons, he is a tiger and the film wildly kickass. But when he stops, and he often does so by going into uninteresting memories laced with un-required song and dance, the film stops too.

There are too many distractions and that’s what makes Baagi 2 a less-than-its-potential action film. The kidnap drama, which unfolds in syrupy Goa, loses momentum when Tiger takes time out to moan and groan about his ex-girlfriend now married and with a daughter who, incidentally, has been kidnapped for no apparent reason. There is no ransom call for two months and the police are hell bent on closing the file as a dead-end investigation.

That’s when she calls her ex-boyfriend who is in the Army now, to help her find her daughter. Of course, there are no leads so the hunt was full of possibilities which unfortunately get whiled away despite the presence of well fleshed out but not much to do character artistes like Deepak Dobriyal, a well-meaning drug peddling Hyderabadi, Randeep Hooda, a totally tantalising undercover policemen on a drug-busting mission (LSD is an appropriate name he gives himself) and Manoj Bajpai who has made a virtue of developing aptly and beautifully with the film and the plot.

Tiger is the centre point and you can’t really fault his hard work both as Ronnie and as a soldier with a perfectly chiseled body. He does justice to all the action scenes by making them picture perfect and yet believable.

Other than him, and despite all the gyrating and thumping of Jacqueline Fernandez to the famous Madhuri number ek, do, teen, there is little much in the movie which craves for a firmer plot and a “do not stray from the main plot” board.

Source: Sunday Pioneer, 1 April, 2018