Singham

The lone-ranger action flick of the 80s come back from the dead? Well, not quite

This movie is a bit of a conundrum. Stylistically, it is an atavistic hangover from the Hindi cinema of the 1980s—one good cop versus a thug who terrorises an entire state—but in terms of throwing up a few ideas to motivate the police force and tackle the unholy nexus between politician and goon, the film is not entirely regressive.

Bajirao Singham (Ajay Devgn) is a police inspector posted to his own backwaters, a small town on the Maharashtra-Goa border, and uses homegrown notions of justice to handle the minor law-and-order problems that come up on his beat. The supportive relationship he establishes between the police station and the citizenry comes in handy when a powerful hoodlum from the state capital in Goa, Jaikant Shikre (Prakash Raj), is sent to Singham’s jail to do a little time before he gets bail.

When Shikre arrives and tries to lord it over this border outpost, the locals defend their inspector and teach him a lesson. Shikre never forgets this affront, and later talks frequently about how he, too, could get similar local support from the Karnataka-Goa border and teach Singham a return lesson.

Geography apart, this film is most interesting when Singham finally realises that his strong arm, lone-ranger methods of law enforcement just do not work with a criminal who is so intimately connected to politicians. If the police force is part of a bureaucracy that has to work within the political system, as he is often told by his DGP, then surely a unity of purpose within the force can allow the police to function, at least temporarily, outside the system, as it were.

Though the film starts off with the inspector’s incorruptibility isolating him from the force, it ends up with his uniting and leading it. In tone, Singham is the old action hero movie come back from the dead, but in substance, there is a definite tweaking of the genre in this Tamilian remake.

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Ajit Duara