Director: Ajay Devgn
Writers: Lokesh Kanagaraj (original story), Aamil Keeyan Khan, Ankush Singh, Sandeep Kewlani, Shridhar Dubey
Cast: Ajay Devgn, Tabu, Deepak Dobriyal, Sanjay Mishra, Gajraj Rao
Action cinema is having a moment. After years of Marvel and DC fatigue, movies like Top Gun: Maverick (2022), RRR (2022), Pathaan (2023) and John Wick: Chapter 4 (2023) have renovated the language of the old-school spectacle. They play out as nostalgic reminders of low-concept action heroes; as smart cinematic manifestations of “back in our day” uncles who thrive on showing the kids how it’s done. A remake of Lokesh Kanagaraj’s 2019 Tamil hit Kaithi, Ajay Devgn’s Bholaa is a subscriber of this old-is-new syndrome. Its story is a throwback to Nicolas Cage-starrer Con Air (1997): A family-bound ex-prisoner’s freedom is hijacked by one night of hell. The treatment is a riff on Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) – the film is designed as one giant action sequence featuring a stage-wise onslaught on the laws of physics and video-game violence. Yet, at no point does the tactless Bholaa feel either old, new or anything in between. It looks like an algorithm-produced movie, a soulless attempt to impress the audience rather than express a sense of masala and scale. Which is to say that action cinema might be having a moment, but Bholaa merits its own moment of introspection.
The plot is a footnote. But here goes. After IPS Diana (Tabu) intercepts a massive drug deal (cue line rhyming ‘heroin’ with ‘heroine’), eccentric gangster Ashu (Deepak Dobriyal) hatches a plan to win back the Rs. 1,000-crore stash. Equipped with his best Nirmal-Pandey-in-One-2-Ka-4 impression and tip-offs from a shady home minister (Gajraj Rao), Ashu sets out to recover the contraband from a British-era police station that’s manned by one constable (Sanjay Mishra) and a couple of detained college students. Simultaneously, he poisons a party full of high-ranking cops elsewhere – Diana is on antibiotics so she’s spared – so that the station stays unprotected. Bholaa (Devgn), a brooding ex-con hoping to meet his daughter after a 10-year sentence, finds himself having to defend the truckload of unconscious cops (and Diana, though her role is such that she may have well been unconscious) against waves of deadly attacks while driving across the state. Encouraged by Ashu’s bounty on Diana, one of the freelance gangs includes a leopard that promptly turns into a pussycat once it sees the might of Bholaa. All the while, Bholaa’s little girl waits to be picked up at her orphanage. She’s never seen her dad, and given his rage issues, she probably grows up to wish that the villains intercepting him that night were more competent.