So yes he made Ghanchakkar…We all make mistakes, okay? Not that I minded Gupta’s unexpected swing into zany comedy. But smartly spun tautly narrated political thrillers are his forte. Aamir and None One Killed Jessica proved it.
Raid , released on 16 March, 2018, proved it again.
An honest-to-goodness income tax officer, played with incorruptible smoothness by Ajay Devgn, who gives away nothing (at least, nothing that we can see on his face) is pitched against a burly smarmy corrupt seedy politician in the hotbed of Lucknow’s politics.What happens when Amay Patnaik (Devgn) takes on Rameshwar Singh (Sourabh Shukla) on the latter’s home turf? Strongly imbued in the spirit of social reform, the Idealistic Bureaucrat as revisited in this film is a bit of an anomaly. Devgn’s Amay fights that very System which has created him. Idealistic heroes tend to come across as single-minded implacable determined bullies. Devgn is all of this.
There isn’t a more secure actor in Hindi cinema than Devgn . It is remarkable how willingly he lets Saurabh Shukla chew up every scene in which they’re together. Saurabh Shukla has all the fun. And Devgn lets him. It is this spirit of passive resistance that the narrative so virilely assumes that makes Raid a riveting watch. The more Devgn’s goodness shines down on the plot, the more Shukla’s decadent corruption showers its reeking beneficence down on the plot that ironically gets its sustenance not from Devgn’s Rama-like heroism but Shukla’s Ravan-esqe rhetoric.
It takes a lot of will-power to stand back and let the corrupt steal the thunder from the incorruptible. Raid tells us virtuosity may be boring. But it is still a rare bird worth capturing in the palm of your hand.
