Sanjay Dutt

(Google Streaming, December 2021) As I’ve often mentioned, I frequently use a quantitative approach (i.e.: lists of films ranked by popularity) to decide what films I’m seeing, and one of the advantages of such a practice is that I will often see a film completely cold to its context. Then it’s amusing to read more about the film (especially those issued from outside the Anglopshere) and understand why it’s so popular. Sometimes, it’s because a film was a box-office hit outside North America. Sometimes, it’s for other reasons. I’ll admit that I had a hard time understanding why Sadak 2 got such a high ranking on my popularity list for 2020 — it felt like a melodramatic but standard revenge thriller, perhaps bolstered by the pedigree of its 1990s predecessor (which I haven’t seen) but still a bit ridiculous, not particularly well-executed and unnecessarily complicated around the edges. Writer-director-producer Mahesh Bhatt doesn’t do particularly well here. The truth became clearer when I started reading about the film and took a look at the detailed ratings for the film. To put it bluntly, Sadak 2 was massively review-bombed in one of those tiresome social media firestorms. Out of 93K votes on IMDB, it received 89K 1-out-of-10 votes, which is a ludicrous indicator that most voters hadn’t even seen the film. No, it’s not a terrific movie, but it’s a professionally made one with a comprehensible plot and at least one decent performance. It’s nowhere near as terrible as the bottom of the barrel. I think I partially understand the reason behind the review-bombing, but it seems so convoluted that I’m not even going to try explaining it to you. There’s some irony in how, in trying to shut down a movie, its opponents ended up making it mandatory viewing for someone who otherwise wouldn’t have even heard of it, but I’m used to the Streisand effect by now — there’s between four and eight movies in my had-to-see Top-100 movies of 2020 list that are there because of straight-up vote manipulation. I was more bored than angry at Sadak 2: as a modern Indian road movie taking aim at modern cult leaders, it has intermittent moments of interest, and Sanjay Dutt does manage a good world-weary performance when compared against his younger, more superficial co-stars. But there’s plenty about the result that could have been made better, more credible, and more suspenseful. Even by the different standards of Indian cinema, Sadak 2 is a disappointment — certainly not worth a one-star movie bombing campaign, but not a good film either.