You cannot fault legendary filmmaker Shankar (Indian, Aparichit, Robot, 2.0) for one thing – conviction. And while we continue to talk about how conviction in your film and its intention is all you need to make sure it translates – watching Hindustani 2, you can’t help but feel ‘ye thoda zyada ho gaya’. A 3-hour haphazard trainwreck with a millennium superstar like Kamal Haasan is definitely not what you sign up for, and perhaps something Haasan didn’t sign up for as well. It is infuriating to think that despite a consistently relevant topic of corruption and the fight against it, Hindustani 2 should have doubled its impact. However, it almost tarnishes the legacy that Indian (Hindustani) created in 1996 by making a mockery of it. You get the intention but the execution is a total disaster.
This hurts more because the first 20-odd minutes of the film seem promising and have you predict a few tropes but still be up for moments that possibly will entertain. But the downward spiral that begins after the heroic entry you expect with Haasan coming in just keeps getting worse and worse as time passes.
There are moments of hope where having a group of young people doing satirical sketches with unique animation techniques is innovative and done rather well – but that’s about it. The endless potential of this track and how it could have acted as a catalyst in Senapathy’s (Haasan) return is such an interesting prospect – but all in vain. A film directed by Shankar is so unique that you can always say this is ‘signature Shankar’- at times for the wrong reasons as well. With Hindustani 2, it is unfortunately mostly for the wrong reasons.
The cretinous need to have songs (which are even worse in dubbed Hindi); the exorbitant use of sets, objects, and equipment; and the need to have long and taxing action sequences along with jolted editing leads to a distracted mess with minimal clarity. For instance, there is a scene where Senapathy is on an electronic unicycle being chased by a large police force – which then pirouettes to an action sequence with a topless Haasan and more topless goons. This would have still been understandable but for now rhyme or reason and shoddy choice of edit, it once again shifts back to Senapathy on the run on the unicycle only to be chased by the police force again. By the way, I would love to have that unicycle that can last so long and is so durable, they should have advertised the brand that makes it.
Some scenes make you marvel at the corruption and human approach to normalising it where even the resentment towards Senapathy from the same people who called him a ‘hero’ is a novelty but there seems to be little to no understanding of how to work on that instead just accentuating it again and again. A fine actor like Siddharth is reduced to banal scenes and character developments, Rakul Preet Singh is there for one or two outbursts, and everyone else – they are just there. You would expect Kamal Haasan to anchor a film like this and to his credit, he tries and tries but just tries too hard. Watching Haasan in prosthetic makeup and gaining abs isn’t novel anymore and neither is his Varma Kalai finger kills. The film just ends up being an unintended boast of how Haasan knows so many languages that he is also seen speaking in Gujarati and Punjabi extensively.
One must have heard how Shankar was supposed to make the Aparichit (Anniyan) remake with Ranveer Singh but it got cancelled. It seems Shankar just did that with Hindustani 2, where if you have seen Aparichit, you cannot help but draw the similarities between that film and this.
The worst part about all this is that there is an already-shot Hindustani 3, whose precap is also shown once the credits roll. There shouldn’t have been!
