Radhe (2021)
(YouTube Streaming, December 2022) Dear Indian cinephile friends: Please stop the downvoting campaigns for movies you don’t like on IMDB. The histogram of votes isn’t fooling anyone, and you end up promoting films that give a terrible impression of your cinema, your culture and your country. Radhe, at first glance, looks like a popular film. So many votes! It must be the people’s choice! But no—as has become depressingly frequent (and an acknowledged issue), there’s some systemic ballot-stuffing going on there, and so badly-reviewed Radhe ends up one of the most popular films of 2021, which leads me to suffer through it. Well, “suffer” may be overstating it: While Radhe is not a good movie, its sins are similar to the worst excesses of 1980s Hollywood cop movies: A macho protagonist dispensing ludicrous levels of violence on stock antagonists, while delivering action sequences, tough-guy poses and (this is unique to India, and not 1980s cop film) musical numbers. Compared to many Indian thrillers of late, it’s both prototypical and featureless. I did like a few things: Salman Khan’s mugging for the camera can be unintentionally amusing, Disha Patani is superb, the musical numbers are fun and the action scenes can be amusing as well. Despite dodgy special effects (also an Indian constant), the film has been made with a decent budget and some filmmaking skills. Alas, it’s all in the service of a dubious package of might-makes-right brutality from the so-called hero, rote plotting, uninspired inclusion of expected elements and a very conservative approach that, when measured against many other examples, makes me feel as if Indian cinema actively regressed over the past decade. Unless it’s the downvoting campaign effect of popularizing the bad movies and over-praising merely competent ones. Come on, Indian cinephile friends: stop with the vote manipulation. It’s just making every one of you look bad.