One of the things that immediately catches your attention in Subedaar is how Suresh Triveni effectively uses the cluttered Indian roads and streets, along with the chaotic government office, to generate a gritty texture for his story. The jam-packed surroundings feel oppressive, and when you see the titular subedaar, Arjun Maurya (Anil Kapoor), in this setting, you feel as if he's trapped in a room whose walls are slowly closing in (Ayan Saxena is the cinematographer). The effect is achieved by establishing a link between the chaos outside and the turmoil raging within Arjun's mind. He's grieving the death of his wife (Khushbu Sundar); he has an estranged relationship with Shyama (Radhika Madan), his daughter; and he's increasingly frustrated by the sibling duo of Prince (Aditya Rawal) and Babli Didi (Mona Singh), who run the local sand mafia. In scenes like the one where Arjun is asked to fill out a form repeatedly by a bank employee (Sada Yadav), we sense a storm of external and internal rage gathering inside him. There is the commotion caused by a woman threatening to pour gasoline on herself. There is the lack of empathy that the employees display toward this woman. And then there is Prince, who insulted Arjun's late wife in front of him minutes earlier. All this comes together to produce a pressure-cooker-like atmosphere that renders Arjun's psychological state palpable.
Triveni and his co-writer, Prajwal Chandrashekar, add another noteworthy layer to their Western. They make it absolutely clear that the enemy is within the boundaries of India, not near or outside the border. "Dushman sarhad pe nahi, shahar mein hai," goes a line here. Triveni, in other words, does with Subedaar what Anubhav Sinha did with Assi: both movies criticize the narrative of always framing enemies as people who exist outside—call them Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, or whatever. Sinha and Triveni ask us to look within; they direct our gaze toward the rot that exists within our society. Given the current climate, one can extend this criticism to the movies that equate patriotism with bashing or defeating the citizens of other countries as if everything around us were absolutely fine. What's more, by making the protagonist a member of the Indian armed forces, Triveni roots Subedaar firmly in the India of today, where defense officers are harassed by civilians—one might as well call them goons—in public. An army officer was assaulted at the Meerut toll plaza. An army man was brutally beaten in West Bengal when he refused to give a "donation." The family of an army officer was threatened by goons in Bareilly while the officer was stationed at the border. In Odisha, engineering students were arrested for stalking and harassing an Army Major and his fiancée.
Triveni, then, creates a revenge fantasy with Subedaar and asserts the might of the men who work in the armed forces. While pointing the gun at Prince, Arjun says that he can shoot him, but he won't—and that's the difference between a gangster and someone with a background in the military. A gangster gathers a crowd; a military man gathers an army. And Kapoor, as the tough hero, is almost magnetic. His rock-hard face and haunting eyes make him a force to be reckoned with. Arjun doesn't instantly use his physical strength to dominate his enemies. He holds himself back like a man who knows he can easily win the fight. And Triveni holds Arjun back for so long that we reach the point of begging him to punch Prince. Triveni behaves like a master manipulator—he pulls this reaction out of the audience. We can't help but feel this way. Prince is such an annoying caricature that our souls cry out to Arjun to riddle him with bullets.
Caricatures are what Triveni and Chandrashekar ultimately provide us with. The easy, black-and-white division between the good and bad guys leaves no room for complexity. The actors are solid, but their characters are paper-thin. Hence, we are left with a collection of mannerisms that are delivered competently by the performers on the screen. The father-daughter angle didn't entirely work for me. Didn't Arjun ever find the time to tell Shyama what he was doing when she called him about the accident? What was his relationship with her like when the mother was still alive? During that time, didn't he ever bother connecting with her? Arjun mentions that he spent most of his days on duty and not with his family, which, I suppose, is meant to be taken as an explanation for the estranged father-daughter relationship. But this is very simplistic. A lot of soldiers spend most of their time away from their families and still end up having healthy relationships. It's safe to say that Triveni didn't bother to work carefully on the script. He simply engineers plot conveniences for the sake of satisfying the demands of the genre he has chosen. What he ends up making is a slick and often smart action drama that comes bearing good intentions. It's relevant, it's okay, but it's not explosive. Instead of a well-thought-out, well-defined cinematic offering, Triveni chooses to impress with a showreel that mainly proves that, like Arjun, he is still young at heart. The blood is still flowing in his body.
Final Score- [5.5/10]
Reviewed by - Vikas Yadav
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Publisher at Midgard Times