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