Resting on the able shoulders of Alia Bhatt, cineaste Vasan Bala’s prisonbreak-thriller Jigra starts off simply and efficiently. The film starts with a flashback where Satyabhama Anand aka Satya and her younger brother Ankur (Vedang Raina), as children, experience the trauma of seeing their father jump off a building. Cut to the present. Satya is the house manager and fixer for her affluent, distant relatives. The ones who gave shelter to her and Ankur after they were orphaned. The relatives call them “family” but Satya knows that she and Ankur are nothing more than “staff”. Alia portrays Satya as a woman who is always holding grief, a storm within. She smiles and softens up only for her brother, the only person she considers family. Vasan, along with writer Debashish Irengbam, lays a novel, solid emotional foundation but it eventually fails to hold up. Once the jailbreak action begins, the emotional beats are left behind and the film gets lost in the labyrinth of genre cliches, absurd creative liberties and needless cinema references. It jettisons what it held close and becomes clunky. Simple becomes simplistic.
Direction: Vasan Bala
Cast: Alia Bhatt, Vedang Raina, Manoj Pahwa, Rahul Ravindran, Vivek Gomber
On a business trip to a fictional, island nation of Hanshi Dao, Ankur and his cousin Kabir (Aditya Nanda) are held up by cops for speeding. A cocaine sachet slips out of Kabir’s pocket. He slips off easily, courtesy of his influential parents, who are the self-serving benefactors of Ankur and Satya. Ankur, however, gets the death penalty. A restless Satya gets on a chartered flight and we see character building as she anxiously stuffs her mouth with everything on the menu. Amitabh Bachchan’s Agneepath (1990) ominously plays on the in-flight television. Going forward, an otherwise effective scene gets dented when Alia mouths “Ab toh Bachchan hi banna hain (Now, I have to become Bachchan). There seems to be a conscious effort to mold Alia into this new-age Angry Young Woman. But, her performance largely remains unidimensional. Vasan too gets excessive with the cinema references. Two Zanjeer (1973) songs: ‘Chaku Churiya Tej Kara Lo’ and ‘Yaari Hai Imaan Mera’ are employed for pure indulgence. I even picked up on a jail inmate being called Wong Kar-Wai.
The first half of most jailbreak dramas are about assembling a team. Here, Alia’s Satya conveniently gets acquainted with Bhatia (an amusing Manoj Pahwa), a “retired” gangster and Muthu (Rahul Ravindran), a former cop. Also, both of them are of Indian origin. Ankur’s jail warden Hansraj Landa (Vivek Gomber) is also of Indian descent. This only goes on to prove that no matter what country, Indians will inevitably find their brethren. Once the genre conventions kick in, Jigra starts taking longer and longer leaps of faith. Everything that is deemed to be “complex” gets done laughably easily. The escape mechanisms are a mishmash of every prison-break thriller. We have a written message being transported in the jail’s food supply, an underground tunnel and ultimately a fire and a riot. All of this is piled up like an uneven Jenga set, which can’t help but topple.
More than anything, Jigra feels like a waste of a talented ensemble. The cinematography by Swapnil S Sonawane, who has worked with Vasan before on Monica, O My Darling (2022) and also has Sacred Games (2018) on his CV, can only provide a sharp, dazzling respite. The songs are by Achint with lyrics by Varun Grover but there is not one earworm, except maybe Diljit Dosanjh’s ‘Chal Kudiye’. Vedang Raina builds up on the promise of his performance in The Archies but his scenes drag an already stretched film. Vivek Gomber, as the authoritarian jail warden, seems to have the most fun with his performance, smoking by the window like a film noir protagonist and delivering dialogues in a heavy Singaporean accent. The film, however, doesn’t have enough propulsion for a runtime of 2 hours 33 minutes. Jigra seems like a fitting remodel of Mahesh Bhatt’s 1993 disjointed thriller Gumrah. Everything starts sincerely but goes off-track.