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‘Raid’, the latest Ajay Devgn star vehicle, is set during the 1980s and follows the exploits of an honest to a T income tax offi­cer, played by Devgn, to bring down a corrupt demigod politician. The film wastes no time in paint­ing Devgn’s Amay Patnaik as an incorruptible, saint of a man. In his first scene, we see him saunter into a country club. The guards won’t allow him in because he’s wearing sandals. In a normal situation, a per­son would fuss with the guards but not Patnaik. He instead appreciates that the guards are following the rulebook, and nobody’s above the rules. The entire movie from then on is an elaboration on Patnaik’s by-the-book approach to everything.

Drama/Thriller

RAID

CAST: Ajay Devgn, Saurabh Shukla, Ileana D’Cruz

DIRECTION: Raj Kumar Gupta

Patnaik has recently shifted to Lucknow with his wife (Ileana D’Cruz) to assume the local office of office the Internal Revenue Ser­vice. He’s a strict task master and always urging his junior officers to wage a crusade on tax evaders and money launderers. At home, he shares a sound relationship with his wife. They don’t fight, don’t argue but give positive feedback to each other. He compliments her for tag­ging along with a government ser­vant whose honesty always leads to abrupt transfers. She compliments him for his uprightness. Their talks are unbelievably sober and refined, given that he’s the kind of husband who’s rarely at home, and she’s the kind of wife who spends her dull afternoon at the verandah waiting for him. Like Patnaik’s saintly image, this relationship feels too idealistic and far-fetched.

The movie picks some momentum when Patnaik starts getting anony­mous tip-offs that direct him to Tauji (played by Saurabh Shukla), an influ­ential local parliamentary leader who enjoys a reputation as the dis­trict’s guardian. Patnaik leads a huge raid party to Tauji’s residence—‘The White House’—in search of InRs 420 crore worth of unaccounted wealth.

Director Raj Kumar Gupta loosely bases the story on the “longest income tax raid” carried out in Luc­know in the 1980s. The premise sounds interesting. But Gupta, who has previously directed ‘Aamir’, ‘No One Killed Jessica’ and ‘Ghanchak­kar’, settles for a more mainstream and dialogue heavy treatment this time. In his previous films, Gupta left things open-ended, without resorting to simplistic resolutions. One can speculate that because his last two films, except ‘No One Killed Jessica’, were box-office bombs, he this time wanted a crowd-pleaser with a dependable Bollywood star. In ‘Raid’ he is least bothered about breaking the film’s tempo: he sneaks in ill-timed songs and makes wild detours.

It’s a challenge to keep the audi­ence hooked to a single location for long, and Gupta and his screen­writer Ritesh Shah lose steam by the middle of the film. Though sup­porting characters—especially the ageing and wisecracking Maaji, the grandmother of Tauji household—provide some comic relief, the story has no interesting twists to break the drudgery.

Hardcore Ajay Devgn fans who like a brooding hero could find ‘Raid’ a passable companion piece to his ear­lier works like ‘Singham’, ‘Drishyam’ and ‘Gangajal’. But for the rest, it’s just Devgn on autopilot.

2 AND A HALF STARS

 Comedy

Gaja Baja

CAST: Anupam Sharma, Sushil Sitaula, Barsha Siwakoti, Gopal Aryal

DIRECTION: Ganesh Dev Panday

*** 3 stars

A pure stoner comedy was long overdue in Nepali cinema. So when writer/director Ganesh Dev Panday announced he was making a film called ‘Gaja Baja’ about Nepali potheads, I was instantly curious. But it took the makers two years to release the film because of their long battle with Nepal’s Film Development Board. Apparently board members felt that the use of gaja (hashish) in the film title promoted drug use and asked the makers to change the title. The case was finally sorted and the film was granted an adult certificate and released all over the country with its original title.

I’m happy to say that Gaja Baja is a genuine genre piece. It sets its protagonists into an action- com­edy rollercoaster, in the vein of the popular ‘Harold and Kumar’ series and Seth Rogen-starrer ‘Pineapple Express’. But the film’s “one day in the life of two potheads” narrative is more similar to 1995’s Friday, a cult stoner comedy starring Ice Cube and Chris Tucker.

Gaja Baja wholeheartedly adheres to the genre tropes. But as it is the first of its kind movie rooted in our own Kathmandu, it feels fresh and different from other regular Nepali films.

As mentioned earlier, the movie tells the story of a day in the life of two pothead slacker friends: Gorey (Sushil Sitaula) and Dadhey (Anupam Sharma). We never know their real names or their detailed backstory, only that Gorey has a dominating father, who feels his son hasn’t done anything in life to deserve milk tea in the morning. Dadhey’s parents too have given up on him. Yet the two are least both­ered about what their parents make of them or about getting jobs. They spend each day with one ambition: getting high.

But this particular day isn’t look­ing good; they have to scour the city’s every nook and cranny to get some weed. This day-long weed hunt brings them in contact with many colorful people and puts them in sticky situations.

Anupam Sharma as the dim-wit­ted Dhadey scores high on the laugh­ter meter. He embodies Dhadhey’s slacker sensibilities so well that he makes the character lovable. He shares a brilliant chemistry with Sitaula’s Gorey.

They feel real and convincing as they fully embrace the lingo and mannerism of potheads. However, their friendship’s spirit called for a smoother ending than the mes­sage-laden ending we get.

Ganesh Dev Panday’s previous offering ‘Manjari’ (2013) had met with an instant backlash when it was discovered that the film was a shot-by-shot remake of a South Indian movie.

He pokes fun at himself in Gaja Baja’s opening credits when he quotes Quentin Tarantino: “I steal from every single movie ever made.” While Manjari dimin­ished him as a plagiarist, his latest film will definitely help him erase that image. He has showed much can be achieved with a limited bud­get, a small setting (most of the film is shot around Mangal Bazar, Shankhamul and New Baneshwor) and a small crew.

Gaja Baja builds its comedy on irony and frustration. The two characters’ trash talking and childish activities are also watchable. All in all, it’s a simple, light-hearted comedy without any depth to its characters. It will, nonetheless, hold you attention for the full 90 minutes

Naaka

Crime, Drama

CAST: Bipin Karki, Thinley Lhamo, Prakash Gandharva, Robin Tamang

DIRECTION: Amit Shrestha

 Among the new crop of Nepali actors, Bipin Karki is some­one who has made a giant leap in just few years. Starting with minor character roles, he has now established himself as a leading man in Nepali movies. He started off with a blink-and-miss role in ‘Loot’ (2012); the following year we saw him sink his teeth in a meatier role in the colossally disappointing ‘Chhadke’. But his breakout performance came in ‘Pashupati Prasad’ (2016), where he portrayed Bhasmey, a low-life gang leader operating inside the premises of Pashupatinath temple. If we sift through the characters he has played in his ten films so far, apart from Jatra (2016), he’s mostly played goofy delinquents.

In his latest film ‘Naaka’, his char­acter is—no surprises for guessing—a smuggler named Goldie, donning a mohawk. Goldie ticks off every box in a stock Bipin Karki character: a small-time crook with a colorful name, a flamboyant sense of style and a speech impediment. Goldie is a menacing anti-hero in this black-crime comedy featuring Nepali smugglers and Tibetan refugees.

Goldie and his lackey Hanuman (Prakash Gandharva) agree to help two Tibetan refugees (Thin­ley Lhamo and Shiva Mukhiya) cross the Sino-Nepal border into Nepali. Goldie is making the delivery on behalf of Lata Bob (Robin Tamang) and his henchman Ganesh (Ram Bhajan Kamat), who have promised Goldie five lakh rupees in return.

But the seemingly easy task turns into a migraine for Goldie, as he has to “karate chop” his way through revenge seekers, bent cops and double-crossers.

Director Amit Shrestha has plucked the news pages to ground the story in a contemporary context. He takes up the issue of Tibetan refugee influx and the theft of dzi beads (highly prized Tibetan stones) that have led to the murder of many Tibetan refugees. Shrestha with the help of his cinematographer Chintan Raj Bhandari resourcefully captures the world of the protagonists. The film’s grungy and grimy look must not have come easy.

There are number of odd-ball characters here and only a few are good-natured. The bonding scenes between Hanuman and the refu­gee girl Sonam make up the film’s most poignant moments. In an early scene, Hanuman makes a puffed face to make Sonam understand he is named after the Hindu mon­key god, not realizing that Sonam only speaks Tibetan and may not be familiar with any Hindu god.

Naaka largely stands on the broad shoulders of Bipin Karki, who gives the film everything in his acting arsenal. Karki’s blend of humor and menace is so compelling that movie-goers often end up rooting for a morally corrupt character. This is a clear sign that today’s audience is ready for bold, complex and nuanced roles in Nepali films.

But Naaka is also marred by prob­lems. It relies on a plot that is wafer thin and highly inconsistent. The first half is slow while the second is filled with hackneyed plot twists, as if the makers were in a rush to get to the climax. Many viewers may also feel that overreliance on slapstick humor undercuts the film’s other­wise serious plot.

It’s not a perfect film and I must say its characters deserved a better plot. But Naaka is a welcome change amidst the cornucopia of terrible mainstream Nepali films that have come out in recent times.

*** Three stars

ANIMATION, ADVENTURE, COMEDY

Peter Rabbit

CAST: James Corden, Domnhall Gleeson, Rose Byrne, Margot Robbie

DIRECTION: Will Gluck

‘Peter Rabbit’ is the big screen adaptation of British author Beatrix Potter’s much-loved children’s book featuring the adven­tures of a naughty country rabbit and his family, whose adventures includes running havoc in the gar­den of their grumpy old neighbor. Potter’s first Peter Rabbit book hit the shelves in 1906 and has since gained tremendous popularity as a bedtime storybook. This modern retelling by director Will Gluck, who also co-wrote the screenplay, is a mixture of CGI ani­mation and live action. Throughout the movie, Gluck relies on a rather puerile display of violence to elicit humor. This backfires as the story doesn’t give us enough space to show affection towards its protag­onist, Peter Rabbit. His slapstick antics are far from hilarious and rather mark him as an annoying character.

The movie begins with Peter Rab­bit (voiced by James Corden), his three sisters—Flopsy, Mopsy and Cottontail—and his cousin Ben­jamin intruding on (and stealing from) the vegetable garden of old Mr. McGregor.

The cat-and-mouse game between Mr McGregor and Team Peter con­tinues until, one day, the old Mr. McGregor dies and his estate is transferred to his nephew Thomas McGregor (Domnhall Gleeson), a Londoner who intends to clean up the place and sell it. With that money he intends to open his own toy-store opposite the toy-store that fired him.

But when Thomas reaches his uncle’s house in the countryside, he discovers it’s in a sorry state. Unbe­knownst to him, after Mr. McGre­gor’s death, the place is being used by Peter and his friends for wild parties. Thomas makes it his mission to cheer the place up and keep it free from intruders, especially those devilish carrot munchers.

Not all humans are baddies in Peter’s eyes. Bea (Rose Byrne) is a cheery next-door-neighbor who is like a mother figure to Peter. She’s a struggling water-color painter and the rabbits regularly pose for her pieces. With Thomas waging war against Peter, the plot shifts gear when both Thomas and Peter start envying each other for Bea’s affec­tion. From then on, the movie nar­rows its focus to a ‘romantic rivalry’ between Thomas and Peter.

Adults or childen?

While watching the movie, I was curious: Who was this movie made for? It doesn’t play out like the typ­ical Pixar animated movies with themes that captivate both adults and kids.

Peter Rabbit reminded me more of the old Wiley E. Coyote and Road Runner cartoons that churned out laughs by putting its characters in physical danger and blowing things up spectacularly. The makers whole­heartedly adhere to the principle that kids will laugh if the film is filled with Tom and Jerry clichés.

So we have people stepping on rakes and knocking their foreheads, and those accidently getting their foot caught on mousetraps. There’s also a sequence where a dynamite ambush is set up inside a rabbit hole. These tricks feel cheap and repetitive.

Peter Rabbit isn’t ambitious enough to give deep layers to its characters. The humans in the movie feel cartoonish and wacky, while the animated characters aren’t given enough scope to make us care about them. Thus their interplay only pro­vides few comedic moments. The rest of the film tries too hard to please the audience.

1 and a half stars.

Black Panther

CAST: Chadwick Boseman, Michael B Jordan, Lupita Nyong’o, Danai Gurira

DIRECTION: Ryan Coogler

 In the months leading up to its release, ‘Black Panther’ had been hyped as a turning point in the superhero genre of movies. The superhero film production giant Marvel Studios for the first time fea­tures a black superhero. Introduced by Marvel comics in the 1960s, Black Panther had to wait 50 years for its long-awaited screen debut in 2016’s Captain America: Civil War. If Civil War was a perfect launch pad for the character, director Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther does some­thing greater. Not only is it a techni­cal marvel, it gives us a superhero who appears every bit human, filled with emotional complexities and vulnerabilities. After the death of the reigning king, his son T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman), aka Black Panther, is crowned the new king of the fiction­al African country named Wakanda. To others, Wakanda is a poverty- stricken Third World country that declines foreign aid and makes no attempts to involve itself in interna­tional trade. But behind this façade, Wakanda is actually a golden, tech­nologically-advanced city.

This reality is concealed from the rest of the world for the fear that outsiders may discover the real rea­son behind Wakanda’s prosperity—the metal Vibranium. This metal is found only in Wakanda. The natives have been using it to come up with cutting-edge technology and devices that would take the outside world thousands of years to develop.

As T’Challa ascends the king’s throne, he is skeptical about his ability to fill the shoes of his father and protect Wakanda and its secrets. As the story unfolds, he’s made to fight off terrorists who are bent on stealing Vibranium. At the same time, he encounters a surprise vil­lain who might pose a major threat to T’Challa’s throne.

Apart from Boseman as T’Challa, the film has a terrific supporting cast with the likes of Lupita Nyong’o, Daniel Kaluuya, Danai Gurira, Andy Serkis, Martin Freeman and Sterling K Brown. But the ones that truly stand apart are Michael B Jordan playing the villain Killmonger and Letitia Wright playing T’Challa’s sister Shuri. Killmonger feels fully realized. He isn’t your cardboard cut-out villain, hungry for world domination. There’s tremendous effort in the screenplay to human­ize the villain, and it works. Like­wise, technology expert Shuri is a wisecracking sidekick to T’Challa who provides some really funny moments.

Director Ryan Coogler’s oeuvre includes 2013’s ‘Fruitvale Station’ (which chronicles the final hours of a young African American man before he was unjustly shot dead by a white cop) and 2015’s ‘Creed’ (a spin-off boxing movie to the Rocky series). In all his films, protagonists have been African-American char­acters tackling themes like racial prejudice and stereotypical image of African-Americans. Black Pan­ther gives Coogler a bigger playing field. It may look like a formulaic Marvel superhero movie peppered with exotic African symbolism but Coogler’s storytelling isn’t slave to the established Marvel aesthet­ics. He delivers an entertainer that expertly portrays, on one hand, the rich African anthropological legacy and, on the other, the African-Amer­ican ghetto life.

Black Panther lives up to its expec­tation. It is a game-changer and will pave the way for bolder stories and voices that have heretofore not found proper place in mainstream Hollywood cinema .

Drama/Biography

Padman

CAST: Akshay Kumar, Radhika Apte and Sonam Kapoor

DIRECTION: R Balki

If you are a regular movie-goer you may have seen at least some biopics about rebel innovators who question status quo. The latest Akshay Kumar starrer ‘Padman’ is one such film inspired by a real-life innovator. The person in question, however, hasn’t contributed to rock­et science or made another Face­book. He’s a social entrepreneur named Arunachalam Muruganan­tham from rural South India, who achieves fame for his invention of a machine that produces low-cost sanitary pads.

 Padman, the movie, is based not in South India but in a village somewhere in Madhya Pradesh and Muruganantham’s fictional counter­part is named Lakshmikant Chau­han. Understandably, this is done to make the film more accessible to the mainstream audience and make the character more suitable for Akshay Kumar. In spite of these factual liber­ties that the movie takes, the actor’s portrayal of a village simpleton who questions the stigma surrounding menstruation and female hygiene successfully captures the story (and spirit) of the original Padman.

Director R Balki and his co-writer Swananda Kirkire have adapted pro­ducer Twinkle Khanna’s short story ‘The Sanitary Man from a Sacred Land’. When we first meet Laksh­mikant, he is a family man living with his young wife (Radhika Apte), accompanied by his mother and two younger sisters. He, a metal-worker, is the sole bread-winner in the fami­ly. We come to know that he has only studied till the eighth grade but that in no way caps his boundless curios­ity. In an early scene, he takes apart a wind-up toy and fashions it into an onion-chopper, just for his wife.

His normal life is disturbed when he finds out that his wife has been using dirty rags during her peri­ods. To him that rag is unfit even to clean his bicycle. So he brings her an expensive packet of sanitary pads from a medical shop. His wife refus­es to accept them because it would burn a hole in her husband’s wallet. Lakshmikant soon understands that buying sanitary pads isn’t an afford­able option for his household. But what if he makes them on his own?

 Soon he discovers that making inexpensive sanitary pads isn’t like taking apart a wind-up toy or mak­ing an onion-chopper. And the big­ger challenge is to make pads while facing the withering criticism of his own family and villagers. They act offended when Lakshmikant tries to hand out his homemade sani­tary pads to girls. They fume at him for poking at something which is strictly a ‘ladies problem’. Thus his obsession to create low-cost sanitary pads comes at a huge cost: his family disowns him and his wife’s family puts pressure on her to divorce him. Roadblocks keep coming in Laksh­mikant’s way but he is not going to rest until he has actually found his solution.

 As mentioned earlier, the story closely follows Muruganantham’s struggles and unfolds in a linear and straightforward manner, stay­ing true to the real story. But since the makers had lots of material to cover, the screenplay at times feels rushed and many events in the story give you the impression that his suc­cess resulted from a series of lucky breaks and not from his persistent hard work.

In many places, the film’s script is downright lazy, as it uses inner monologues to make us under­stand how a character is feeling at the moment. It is the support­ing cast that breathes life into the average dialogues and makes the clunky scenes work. Radhika Apte is convincing as Lakshmikant’s wife. Meanwhile, Sonam Kapoor is likable in a small yet crucial role.

Padman has its downsides but it is made with sincerity and gus­to. The movie should be cherished not because it’s an Akshay Kumar star-vehicle but because it dares to celebrate and signify the work of a real-life hero.

3 Stars

Title: Sher Bahadur

Director: R Rajbanshi

Cast: Menuka Pradhan, Sunil Thapa, Karma and Rabindra Jha

It’s ironic how the latest Nepali thriller ‘Sher Bahadur’, a movie about burglars getting into
trou­ble when they decide to steal from the wrong man, is itself guilty of stealing the plot of the 2016 Amer­ican film ‘Don’t Breathe’. While the original film tightly grounded itself by packing in some genuinely fresh punches in the otherwise over­wrought horror genre, its Nepali counterpart never makes us fully care about its central characters and gives us many moments of uninten­tional hilarity.

The movie opens with Bihari (Rabindra Jha), an Indian car thief, entering Dharan in a stolen car. He takes the car to a garage where a Nepali mechanic by the name of Kumar (played by Karma) works. Bihari is used to bringing stolen cars to Kumar’s place and Kumar is used to re-selling the cars with fake papers and number plates. Then we meet Maya (Menuka Pradhan), a bar dancer whom both Kumar and Bihari have a crush on. Whenever Bihari is in town, the trio gang up to burglarize rich households.

In an over-extended scene, we see them enter a house in the day dressed like salesmen pretending to sell toilet cleaners. This gives them the opportunity to scan the house for available loot, which they easily rob later that night. Meanwhile, we get to know that Maya is putting together money to take her (missing) sister’s daughter to Kathmandu, away from Maya’s unkind stepmoth­er. Kumar wants to buy a garage of his own. And Bihari’s intent is to make Maya his wife some day.

Soon fed up with small-time bur­glaries that yield them only pennies, they look to score big. When they hear that a blind man named Sher Bahadur (Sunil Thapa) is stashing large amounts of cash in his house, they target him. For them the job is super easy: what danger would an old retired army officer pose, that too if he’s blind and lives only with his dog? But when they break and enter the house, they realize they’ve misjudged him. They soon find out that the man will not, on any condition, forgive those intruding his privacy.

Surely, the premise of burglars getting locked down inside a house and being preyed upon by a mon­ster of a man sets up an intriguing hook for a contained thriller. But director R Rajbanshi wastes much of screen time in establishing the band of burglars.

We are also made to sit through repetitive information on burglar alarms and home security with bor­ing and clunky dialogue exchanges. These sequences are so slow, it kills the built up for the moment when the trio come face to face with Sher Bahadur.

Sunil Thapa’s performance as the titular antagonist is wobbly and inconsistent. He tries to appear scary by grunting and quivering his facial muscles, which honestly aren’t hair-raising but laughter-inducing. The same goes for Rabindra Jha, whose already established forte as a comedian prevents us from taking him too seriously in moments where his character demands emotional maturity.

Even at times when Jha’s charac­ter is running for his life or getting shot at, the majority of the audience members continues laughing. As for Menuka Pradhan and Karma, the two talented actors are wasted, as they mostly sleepwalk through their scenes and mindlessly parrot their dialogues.

‘Sher Bahadur’ falls flat under its shoddy special effects and lackluster acting. It is inconsistent and messy throughout and is guilty of a cardi­nal sin for a thriller: lack of any com­pelling terror or suspense sequences to get your adrenalin rushing.

Rating: 2/5