By Subhash K Jha
Ram Setu
Written & Directed by Abhishek Sharma
Rating: **
Ram Setu tries really hard to be politically correct. It is a product soaked, no dyed in saffron.
I don’t know what the original colour of the plot was. Certainly not green. But perhaps initially they wanted to make film tinged in saffron rather than drowned in the preferred colour. What we finally get is Akshay Kumar as an archeologist whom we first meet in Afghanistan . It is the kind of overpunctuated underlined prologue which even James Bond would find exhausting,so who are we to live through it?
Live, we do. There is so much more to come. A lot of it plainly ridiculous. At some point the plot inexplicably moves to Sri Lanka because that is where Raavan apparently lived(whether the geographical Sri Lanka is actually the Lanka referred to in the Ramayan is a debatable point).And if our hero Aryan can prove the existence of Raavan he can prove the existence of Ram and that the Ram Setu was built by Ram.
Forget the Setu. I am still trying to locate the bridge between the mythological and the rational in this oddly lackluster back-to-roots drama. Imagine Kantara without its heartstopping last thirty minutes. That’s Ram Setu for you.
The cinematography (by Aseem Mishra) is a saving grace , as it trails Archeologist Akshay, and his comely assistants Jacqueline Fernandez and Jeniffer Piccinato(who are in it for the ride in the jungles of Sri Lanka) and a South Indian Hanuman AP, short for Anjani Putra played by a lively Satyadev Kancharana.
The rest of the cast is caught between the whimper and the blast . There is little here to hold on to except some very poor imitation of Indiana Jones, with Akshay Kumar looking more like director Abhishek Sharma than Harrison Ford.
Dr Chandraprakash Dwivedi who is credited as ‘creative producer’ has a lot to answer for.
Where but in this film does mythology mingle with history with such unfruitful bland results? We will never know.