‘Subedaar’: Buried in its own sand

From the get-go, ‘Subedaar’ is perfumed with the dry ruthlessness of sand and the merciless thuggery of North India — all set to many iterations of the Haryanvi earworm ‘Gypsy’.

A tractor’s dark, domineering smoke cuts through the faint, impotent blue of the sky in the fictional, morose town of Kokh.

Children run across endless mounds of sand, the reckless lawlessness of this mafia-run region almost part of the landscape — until one of them dies playing in a waterbody rendered too deep by illegal mining, the 15th such incident, we are told by a journalist at the scene who seems more concerned with the rhyme scheme and ‘watch-ability’ of his reportage.

Elsewhere, we meet our righteous leading man, Subedaar Arjun Maurya (Anil Kapoor), who — of all places in the world — chooses this hellhole to retire in, hoping to forge deeper bonds with his daughter Shyama (Radhika Madan) after the recent death of his wife.

Arjun is the soft yet domineering, collected man cinema so dearly loves: the sort of Armyman who takes on goons to single-handedly rescue a town’s morality, but is also the only person who stops at the red light in this postcard of dust and creative abuse.

The death of another child is the least of the mafia’s worries. Its attention is instead fixed on how this might interrupt the birthday of one Prince (Aditya Rawal): the human embodiment of eve-teasing, he dresses in loud, flowy fabrics — as all small-town Bollywood goons apparently must.

Apart from being a hobby murderer, Prince serves as a constant roadblock in the illegal empire ambitions of his sister Babli (Mona Singh), the imprisoned kingpin — ‘queenpin’, perhaps? — of the sand-mining racket, and her de facto goon-in-chief, Softy (Faisal Malik).

When Arjun takes up a job as Softy’s bodyguard — and by extension Prince’s babysitter — it becomes clear that Kokh is a town where bad things happen with alarming regularity.

By the end, sadly, you realise this is largely all the narrative has to say.

A protest by the dead child’s uncle ends with him being shot in the head; the child’s mother is manhandled not only by the mafia but also by players of the corrupt ‘system’; Prince beats someone up for no discernible reason at a water park; Shyama confronts a college creep sending her inappropriate videos. All this unfolds within the first 30 minutes.

What follows is the story you can already see coming: Arjun’s potent morality standing alone against a parade of goons, the man seemingly placed by fate to right the town’s many wrongs; while Shyama fights her own battles.

But the film’s many, many violent plots and arcs — combined with the dead-wife and poor-mother-of-a-dead-child tropes — gradually paint ‘Subedaar’ into an existential corner of its own making, the cinematography working overtime to stitch the narrative together.

Seasoned actors Kapoor and Singh — needless to say — hold their ground, though the script rarely allows them to shine. Madan’s Shyama, meanwhile, feels jittery and unfinished. The standout is Rawal’s Prince, who makes you want to rip his face off every time he appears on screen.

Across its gruelling nearly two-and-a-half hours, the film keeps oscillating between cinematic styles.

Like that friend at a party who’s had too much to drink, ‘Subedaar’ blurts out far too much for comfort, then spends the rest of the night panicking about it.