Ghayal Once Again review: Sunny Deol the actor is still a lethal weapon

Ghayal Once Again Movie Review

Ghayal Once Again movie review: Sunny Deol the actor is still a lethal weapon and can blow his opponent all the way across the room. Sunny the director should just get out his way.

For once, Bollywood has come out with a sequel which feels organically grown. The 1990 hit ‘Ghayal’, featuring Sunny Deol as the ordinary-guy-forced-into-taking-the-law-into-his-own-hands, gave the leading man a lasting edge in the snarling stakes. No one could do it better.

‘Ghayal Once Again’ picks up threads from where the original had left off (there are brief flashbacks to prove it), borrows a character from the previous film, and presents the same leading man as older and grizzled, but as filled with hurt and rage as before, doing what he did before: acting as a one-man army against the corrupt system.

The difference is in the director. Sunny Deol picks up the baton, and tries running with it. But he doesn’t go too far. Because the plot is a tired, tiresome cobbling together of bits and pieces of films we’ve seen before: the villains are familiar—a wealthy businessman (Jha), a complicit politician (Joshi), and their henchmen. Same old, yes, but with one more difference: many of the bad guys are ‘firangis’.

And that’s the trouble with this ‘Ghayal’ redux. The foreign element is all over the place: parts of the film remind you of ‘Die Hard’, ‘Mission Impossible’, ‘True Lies’, and other Hollywood actioners, overlaying a bunch of youngsters being terrorized by hoodlums, a Mumbai over-run by goons belonging to a billionaire who lives in a distinctive shaped building, an RTI activist (Puri) who comes to a sorry pass, and Ajay Satyakam Mehra galloping to the rescue.

The chief antagonist, on paper, may be the richie-rich played by Jha, and his cohorts, but the guy who squares up to Sunny Deol, and spends a lot of screen time chasing him, and being chased by him is a faceless, nameless ‘firangi’ fellow. That’s an instant bummer. Here’s our very own home-grown ‘dhai kilo ka haath’ who can show up the likes of Arnie Schwarzenegger any ol’ time, and who can kick it still, and there’s not even a properly menacing villain who can match up to him, snarl for snarl?

Bahut na-insaafi hai. Amrish Puri, we miss you.

Till the film keeps moving briskly—the chase scenes are effective, if stretched—you stay with it. And then the ludicrous plot with all those hanging threads kicks in, and prevents us from getting what we’ve come to this film for : to see Sunny D. do his thing the way only he can.\

Sunny the actor is still a lethal weapon and can blow his opponent all the way across the room. Sunny the director should just get out his way.

Sunny Deol the actor is still a lethal weapon

It is amply clear from the very outset that the quaintly antiquated Ghayal Once Again is unlikely to achieve its avowed goal - help Sunny Deol's dhaai kilo ka haath regain its lost box-office potency.

Several other Bollywood stars have since moved into the fists of fury space and the deadly Deol's dumbbells and decibels are no longer as saleable as they once were.

On his part, the actor, coming out of a longish hiatus, has left nothing to chance. He has produced, written and directed the film himself, thereby ensuring that he is in virtually every frame.

Ghayal Once Again has an array of efficient supporting actors - Nadira Babbar, Tisca Chopra, Ramesh Deo, Narendra Jha, Mohan Joshi, Zakir Hussain, Harsh Chaya and Sachin Khedekar - but the spotlight is squarely on the very, very angry and focused-on-vengeance Sunny Deol persona.

The former boxer is surrounded by a quartet of youngsters who swear by his messianic zeal.

Having completed his jail term, Ajay Mehra is now the editor of a crusading newspaper titled Satyakam.

One of the girls who joins his fight, the daughter of a high-flying, workaholic woman, blogs about the wages of flawed parenting. And that is among the film's many pet peeves.

Even the villain's wayward son is given the benefit of doubt by his own parents - and eventually even the hero - and absolved of personal culpability for turning out to be the obnoxious brat that he is.
What separates Ghayal Once Again from most other Bollywood franchises is that it is a genuine sequel to the 1990 super hit Ghayal and takes off from where the previous film left.

The script, co-written by Deol, harks back, via black and white flashes, to what happened all those years ago to Ajay, his wife Varsha (Meenakshi Seshadri), his accomplice in uniform Joe D'Souza (Om Puri, who is the only other actor who reprises his original role), and his nemesis Balwant Rai (Amrish Puri).

It is also indirectly reminiscent of at least two even older Hindi films.

One, the name of the paper that Ajay Mehra employs in his battle against the system comes from a 1969 Dharmendra starrer in which the actor played a fiercely honest young man negotiating a corrupt world.

And two, Ajay's fearless daily tangentially recalls the last time a similar newspaper figured prominently in a Hindi film - 1984's Mashaal, starring Dilip Kumar as an uncompromising journo.
No wonder Ghayal Once Again looks every inch like a film that has arrived at least 25 years too late even though it does reflect the undeniable fact that corruption is still a way of life in this country.
This time around, Ajay's enemies are a business tycoon Raj Bansal (Narendra Jha) and his spoilt offspring, Kabir (Abhilash Kumar).

The baddies hold total sway over the administration and the legal system. The home minister (Manoj Joshi) and a lawyer (Sachin Khedekar) dance to the Bansals' tune.

The media isn't spared either. It is the lecherous proprietor-editor of a rival paper (Harsh Chaya) who triggers the film's first big confrontation.

He sexually assaults a young female journalist and drives her to suicide.

Clearly, Sunny Deol is still stuck in the primordial days of Hindi cinema when the only recourse left for a rape victim was death.

Late in the second half, one crucial plot twist ratchets up the hero's rage to literally unmanageable heights - he hijacks a chopper to mount an attack on his adversary's high-rise abode.

That apart, Ghayal Once Again is a rather tame affair that banks on the interventions of Hollywood action coordinator Dan Bradley (credited as second unit director) to whip up some excitement.
The primarily result is a protracted chase sequence in which Ajay Mehra's truth-seeking 'missionaries' are pitted against Raj Bansal's murderous 'mercenaries'.

The dash begins on one side of the interval and continues well into the second half. The tussle is over a hard disk that has a recording of a murder committed by the hot-headed Bansal scion.

Ajay faces hell - a bullet grazes the side of his temple, a couple of cars hit him as he weaves his way through Mumbai's busy roads, and his own vehicle turns turtle after evading a thundering train - but he comes out unscathed.

Sunny Deol's acting takes the standard path. He hollers when he is angry, he scowls when he is flummoxed, and he breathes fire when he means business. It is a style that belongs to the Stone Age.
Soha Ali Khan, playing a psychiatrist treating the hero for his blackouts and meltdowns, is always at hand to remind him to pop the prescribed pills before he careens out of control.

But obviously, she does not have the power to extend any such favours to the audience. So watch Ghayal Once Again at your own risk and only if you can withstand the relentless onslaught it unleashes.