K.G.F: Chapter 2 movie review: Old wine in grand hero worship bottle

K.G.F: Chapter 2 movie review rating: Three stars out of five

There are some unwritten rules to a one-man army action movie like K.G.F: Chapter 2. A major one goes like this – Thee shall never carry a gun to a bare-fisted battle. 

Why?

Because if the hero is gunned down in the opening scenes, how will the rest of the movie get made?

Therefore, no guns please.

As logic-defying are the many fight scenes of K.G.F: Chapter 2, director Prashant Neel dives into the stark gold mining landscape, setting the invincibility tone early on, creating an entertaining graphic novel-like superhero spectacle that fares better than K.G.F: Chapter 1 in single-minded storytelling. He does this despite the wafer-thin story and plot.

Picking up from K.G.F: Chapter 1, Rocky (Yash) takes over the control of the gold mine, even as the gangsters who hired him as an assassin can’t take it.

Can Rocky face the wrath of I-am-a-Viking Adheera (Sanjay Dutt), brute power of Indian prime minister Ramika Sen (Raveena Tandon), foxy Guru Pandian (Achyuth Kumar), a bitter Andrews (B.S.Avinash), and others?

Will Reena (Srinidhi) reunite with Rocky? Who will ultimately rule over K.G.F?

Director Prashant Neel punches in elements from his confessed love for seventies Hindi cinema. Rocky is clearly the angry young man, living the life he promised his late Nirupa Roy-like mother (Archana Jois). But unlike Salim-Javed’s well-defined characters, Rocky is a magnified gangster with no clear moral strokes.

He loudly proclaims Reena as entertainment, literally kidnaps her, and then says he won’t bed her until they are married! There’s the moral compass for you.

Rocky makes the labourers at K.G.F work as hard as before, probably harder, only that he isn’t treating them cruelly or killing them. Rocky himself works with them at the mines, somehow that seems to justify the exploitation.

Yash as Rocky commands the screen one-man army image with towering presence and quirky dialogue delivery. Sanjay Dutt and Raveena Tandon are terrific as larger-than-life villains. Ravi Basrur’s background score is deliberately short of noise, heightening the ‘epicness’ of the epic proceedings.

Bhuvan Gowda’s cinematography is terrific, giving us some superb drone shots and darkened shades of evil, matching the director’s scale and submerging us in the world of K.G.F.

Ujwal Kulkarni’s editing has some clever touches, watch out for the screen blanks in a car chase, a clever action-elevating edit that hides any glitches and adds style.

The epic scene after epic scene screenplay tries to dissolve many of the movie’s illogical details. They don’t always succeed though.

The hero worship gets too loaded especially in the first half, with shot after shot of Rocky posing away at K.G.F. Also, the ultra-machoism is jarring in parts. It is a relief when the hero finally bleeds.

The Reena-Rocky romance is plastic and never convincing, the weakest link of K.G.F: Chapter 2.

When Ravi Basrur finally creates a quiet moment in the background score, for an unexpected, shattering death, wish he had allowed more silences, or was it the director’s brief to use the background score like a loudspeaker?

There are too many repeated scenes of how fearful everyone is of Rocky, though the stolen gold biscuit, flying jeeps scenes stand out as escapist fun.

What Prashant Neel does good despite the inconsistencies, weak storyline and absence of logic – he manages to stay faithful to the over-the-top one-man-army genre. Like K.G.F: Chapter 1, he creates an escapist graphic novel-like entertainer that works for staying true to a genre otherwise done to death by Indian commercial cinema.

K.G.F: Chapter 2 rides on Yash’s mega hero appeal, epic hero-villain fights, dark setting, and the grand setup. Though not assured as RRR, K.G.F. Chapter 2 just about holds as an escapist macho-man entertainer.    

(I saw the Hindi dubbed version. K.G.F: Chapter 2 is originally made in Kannada.)