Jaat is big on beheading. Correction: Jaat is huge on beheading.
Telugu director Gopichand Malineni’s Hindi debut loves, worships, fusses over its decapitations. Head-cutting is how the gangster Ranatunga (Randeep Hooda) and his posse terrorise their victims, and head-cutting is how Jaat hopes to convince audiences that the hero Baldev (Sunny Deol) is up against some very ugly types.
Ranatunga, his wife Bharati (Regina Cassandra), his brother Somulu (Vineet Kumar) and glowering hoodlums with wild hair and wildly swinging accents rule over a lawless patch of Andhra Pradesh. Baldev wanders into Ranatunga’s turf by accident, but only after their respective connection to the Ramayana epic has been established.
While Ranatunga has arrived in India from Sri Lanka, Baldev walks into the frame to the throb of “Jai Shri Ram” techno beats. Baldev soon proves that he is as merciless as he is god-like, bleeding for the villagers being oppressed by Ranatunga while also ensuring that blood flows freely.
The film is nasty, brutish and long. The 153-minute Jaat is most alert and alive in its elaborately choreographed action set pieces, in which gravity, restraint and logic are skillfully slaughtered as surely as Ranatunga’s men.
Miraculously armed with a UA16+ certificate, Jaat sets itself up in direct contest with previous ultraviolent Adults-only films such as Animal, Kill and Marco. The movie itself is unapologetic about turning massacre into empty spectacle.
As if the partial disrobing of a group of policewomen led by Vijaylaxmi (Saiyami Kher) isn’t sickening enough, Jaat replays the scene again, and again. People are hurt or die in gruesome ways in a movie with a heightened, hyper-real quality and a near-desperate attempt to shock.
By the end, Jaat is scrambling to prove Baldev’s Forrest Gump-like omnipotence, suggesting that his adamantine-coated self has played a starring role in every recent war of note. The mystery over Ranatunga’s Sri Lankan connection finally becomes clear.
Little humour comes in the way of director Malineni’s tribute to Sunny Deol’s tough guy image. Flashes of Deol’s previous invincible heroes, from Ghayal to Gadar via Damini, are projected onto Baldev’s bulk. Baldev declares that he has come to conquer South India after having bellowed his way through North India.
Jaat does have what the recent Salman Khan release Sikandar sorely missed: an ageing star who is convincingly agile in the action set-pieces and can make the glyercine rolling down his cheeks feel somewhat real. Deol’s unabashed machismo gets a fitting adversary in Randeep Hooda’s chilling monster.
The movie is down to these two evenly matched men. Except for Regina Cassandra’s decapitation-addicted spouse, every other character is forgettable, their only purpose to be molested, brutalised or beheaded.
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