‘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