Hero review: Sooraj Pancholi flexes muscles, Athiya Shetty pouts, and the film scores zero
Sooraj Pancholi does a headstand on a platform of nails,
drives a bulldozer through a wall, slams dudes through solid objects, does a
laser dance in a disco and swings Athiya Shetty (who has taken three selfies
within 15 seconds) around like a weapon to knock out a giant baddie. These are
the first few minutes of Hero, directed by Nikhil Advani, and if there was any
justice in this world, the film would have ended there. Unfortunately for
Pancholi, Shetty and all those watching Hero, the world is cruel and unusual.
It's difficult to say what debutants Pancholi and Shetty are
capable of because Advani's remake of Subhash Ghai's Hero starts off as awful
and ends as boring. There are about two genuinely emotional moments in the
film's 131 minutes. In these, one senses Shetty in particular may just have
some acting talent, but Advani and his screenwriter Umesh Bisht would rather
bludgeon the audience with stupidity than give the newcomers an honest chance
at winning us over.
Film poster of Hero. Image Credit: FacebookFilm poster of
Hero. Image Credit: Facebook
Hero is a '80s' film that should never have been taken out
of the vault. The dialogues, peppered with outdated flourishes like
"imaandari ka pilla" and "aaj main surprise nahin, shock dene
aaya hoon", are melodramatic. The only twist in Hero is when Shetty ties
up her hair. The fights are unexciting. The cinematography is dull and the
songs sound like wailing cats in heat who have been auto-tuned. Salman Khan's
"Main Hoon Hero Tera" is the only example of melody in the soundtrack
and Khan displays more acting in the sweet, little video of the song's
recording than he has in most of his blockbusters. Sadly, he shows up only at
the end. There's a lot to endure before you get your Bhai fix.
Sooraj (Pancholi) is a thug whose bulging muscles hide a
heart as mushy as a roasted marshmallow. When he isn't bodybuilding or beating
up people, he's helping the needy. For no fault of his own, he lands up in the
middle of a glowering contest between baddie Pasha (Aditya Pancholi) and
Inspector General Mathur (Tigmanshu Dhulia).
Pasha tells Sooraj to kidnap IG Mathur's daughter, Radha
(Shetty). Since Pasha is like a father to Sooraj — apparently, Sooraj's mother
was like a sister to Pasha, which hints at a rather incestuous family tree, but
never mind those details — our buff hero spirits Radha away. It helps that
Radha has the intelligence of a dull four-year-old. Despite having two
policemen in the family (her father and brother), Radha finds nothing odd about
a Mumbai police inspector taking her to a safe house in Jammu. It also doesn't
bother her that she's in a wooden hut, in the middle of nowhere, with five
strange men she's never seen before and that these 'policemen' don't let her
call home. There are snowball fights, drunken nights around a bonfire and an
occasionally shirtless Sooraj to ogle at ... what more could a 20-something PYT
want?
Along the way, a man starts singing in a girl's voice,
Sooraj and Radha fall in love, Pasha roars mightily, IG Mathur bays for
Sooraj's blood, and a bicycle discovers its inner Rajinikanth and neutralises a
bullet. And then, as if 115 minutes of the film's barely-there plot wasn't
enough of an endurance test, we get a song that recaps all of the first half
and parts of the second half.
By the time interval strikes, you've got to feel bad for
young Pancholi and Shetty. Sooraj and Radha may be sporting bruises that look
like the make-up team was using lipstick to make tally marks — perhaps to show
how many days of shooting these two newcomers had survived? — but the real
wounds are deep. Varun Dhawan and Alia Bhatt got the vapid but glossy Student
of the Year. Ranbir Kapoor and Sonam Kapoor got the nonsensical and lavish
Saawariya. The son of Aditya Pancholi and daughter of Sunil Shetty get Hero, a
film as B-grade as their fathers' filmography. Hero is ill-conceived, outdated
and lazily made, with neither director nor crew giving a hoot for details like
continuity or logic. Pancholi and Shetty deserved better; not because they're star
kids, but because as actors they commit as much as they can to the colossal
ineptitude that is their debut film.
Yet, rather than being a cakewalk, Hero is actually a
serious challenge for both Pancholi and Shetty. Shetty has to showcase herself
in a role that requires her to play a bimbo and make sure she doesn't blink
when the wind machine blows her hair away from her face. This is a shame
because with her athletic frame and deadly cheekbones, it's easy to imagine
Shetty as a desi Lara Croft.
Pancholi is making his debut at a time when Bollywood has a
set of versatile young actors who are proving to be adventurous in their
choices and versatile, but all this young man gets to do in Hero is show off
his musculature. Unfortunately for him, every hero in Bollywood seems to have
abs and the bland character he plays in Hero makes Pancholi look like a pale
replica of Salman Khan, but without Khan's charisma.
On the plus side, things can only look up for Pancholi and
Shetty after this, because it's going to be tough to find a project as
forgettable as Hero. Here's to their future.
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