Shivaay: Takes too long to take off

Cast: Ajay Devgn, Sayesha Saigal, Erika Kaar, Abigail Eames, Vir Das, Girish Karnad, Saurabh Shukla

Rated: 5/10

Pepperfry or some such would have sold Shivaay as a slow juicer. But once the juice starts flowing out of the droopy eyes and flexing biceps of an overly supplemented Ajay Devgn, and his slick action soiree, there is no stopping the edgy rollercoaster jumping nations from all the way from India to Bulgaria.

So you wonder why Devgn, who is actor-director and producer of this film, took around an hour to get to the point. Generally, he is not so daft, or wayward for that matter. But in Shivaay, he first introduces a stunning but prolonged sequence of his mountain and cliff jumping prowess which establishes him as the superhuman being with super duper Himalayan powers, as someone whom Lord Shiva himself has given the strength to throttle the life out of anyone who messes with him.

But once his daughter is kidnapped by the Russian paedophile and flesh trade mafia in a foreign land, abused physically by an old jazz singing freak, Devgn takes too much time to get to her, making you realise that he is not so superhuman after all, despite the Trishul, the sarp, the Shivaya locks and the dumroo tattooed all over his rippling body.

It is tedious to watch him moan and groan as his little one becomes a tattered victim before he can reach her. But that is what builds up the excitement for the next one-and-a-half hours of the film which has been needlessly stymied by, first, an Incredible India kind of adventure tourism campaign by Devgn and then by a love story that looks skewed and unreal despite the heroine looking as ethereal, beautiful and pure as the pristine Himalayas.

The production values of Shivaay are slick and pretty high-end. The spirit behind the movie is also good intentional, specially because it touches upon a global scourge — that of paedophilia.

But the perception of Devgn is not of a man who stands and stares, and definitely not romance a woman for a long period. That’s where Shivaay fails, that’s where Devgn took a bad leap. He should have stuck to maar-dhaad kind of stuff which should have kept his audience happy and on a constant crescendo. That’s him. 

Source: Sunday Pioneer, 30 October, 2016