Rohit Shetty

(Prime Streaming, May 2022) There are so, so many things wrong with Sooryavanshi that I’m not sure where to begin, except perhaps by the counterintuitive conclusion that I enjoyed it a lot more than most of the well-known Indian films that Netflix/Prime has been throwing at me lately. Apparently a fourth film in a series launched by 2011’s Singham (which has been sitting in my Netflix watchlist for years), this is the kind of over-the-top action cop movie that the Americans are too ashamed to be doing these days. And as is the case in high-octane action films, it often betrays social norms a bit too clearly. For Western viewers, the first few minutes set the tone of writer-director-producer-etc. Rohit Shetty’s aggressive, glossy, flashy approach, and clearly points at Pakistan as the source of evils plaguing modern India. Reaching for real-world trauma (the 1993 Mumbai bombings) in an attempt to ground its super-heroic characters, Sooryavanshi quickly, consistently and disturbingly presents its policemen heroes as cool and unimpeachable – always justified by circumstances. Anyone trying to track the morals of the film will be left guessing by the script’s quasi-schizophrenic swings. This is a film in which the villains are clearly Pakistani, but the hero has a long sequence in which he preaches to Muslims the importance of brotherhood and justice – but shoots them dead at the film’s climax in response to a taunt after making a point of capturing them alive. Marital difficulties (as his wife understandably doesn’t want anything to do with him after their son is shot) always resolve themselves in his favour and his wife’s adoring capitulation: it helps when he rescues her from terrorists and a bomb vest – Stockholm syndrome and all that. Psychological torture is played for unconvincing laughs as long as it’s the right person being led to believe their loved ones are being tortured, and there’s a disturbing hero-worship of the cop protagonists that’s as blunt as anything made in Hollywood’s worst years. It would be tempting to propose that the filmmakers don’t know what they’re doing, but I prefer to think that they know exactly what they’re doing: In the Masala tradition, give them a firehose of fallacies and let the audience pick what they like. It’s not that stupid an approach considering that there’s quite a bit to like once you ignore what you don’t:  The direction is energetic, the protagonists are coded as cool (the protagonist of Singham even coming back, earning hushed tones of admiration for his handling of guns), the action scenes have some panache and there’s a vision of modern India here that often feels fun and dynamic. There are plenty of issues with Sooryavanshi (conspicuous musical numbers, blunt-force melodrama, and action sequences that directly contradict themselves in the span of thirty seconds in order to get an extra thrill out of it) but it’s not boring even at 145 minutes –especially when it’s espousing self-contradictory morals and running roughshod over continuity. Let’s face it: you’ve seen worse from Hollywood itself.