Satyagraha

Hindi: U/A ¬¬¬

Director: Prakash Jha

Cast: Amitabh Bachchan, Ajay Devgn, Manoj Bajpai, Kareena Kapoor, Arjun

Rampal, Amrita Rao



Any films on a serious topic and starring Amitabh Bachchan gets even the weariest of cinemagoers salivating. Add to that the names of Ajay Devgn and Kareena Kapoor, and the appetite is whetted further.

Put Prakash Jha behind the camera, and it turns into a must-watch. Base the story on arguably the most popular anti-corruption movement of our times, and you are bound to have a winner. But it all depends on how aware you are of the events that unfolded during Anna Hazare’s stir in New Delhi.



Instead, picture an old man (Amitabh Bachchan) who loses his government engineer of a son in an apparent accident, slaps the district collector whose office makes his daughter-in-law (Amrita Rao) run from pillar to post for the compensation the local MLA (Manoj Bajpai) had announced, gets arrested in the process and becomes the focal point of a movement that his son’s friend (Ajay Devgn) and the local political activist/goonda (Arjun Rampal) start to free him.



They are aided by a TV reporter (Kareena Kapoor) who refuses an interview with the prime minister to cover something she was told about by someone who she’s only met twice, and a local lawyer (Deepak Dobriyal) who charges corporates hefty fees, but fights cases of the poor for free.



Apart from the slight changes in characters and circumstances, like two major twists in the end, the story hardly deviates from the events of Ramlila Maidan in Delhi. Even the name of the round is unchanged! The target audience, after all, seems to be those who hadn’t followed Hazare’s agitation.



What works for Satyagraha is some good acting by Amitabh Bachchan and Manoj Bajpai, as well as some strong music that is sure to make it to the playlist of the next anti-corruption agitation. There are also moments that will inspire and motivate a great deal, but they are precious few, and come at an interval of what feels like parsecs.



As for failures, there are many. The events are dumbed down, the characters are cliched, Dobriyal and Rampal are grossly underused, and the pace is so inconsistent that your brain wanders in some scenes, and works overtime in others.



Satyagraha is clearly not Prakash Jha’s best offering. But at a time when a film like Chennai Express is breaking records, this was probably the need of the hour. Let’s hope he does a better job with his next.

