Jaat movie review: Sunny Deol-starrer leaves you numb, unmoving, and desensitised

aat Movie Review, Rating: Sacrificed at the altar of all that gruesome blood-letting and mutilated bodies hanging from the rafters and savaged women forced to huddle together in this Sunny Deol-Randeep Hooda-starrer is coherence and plot.

Jaat Movie Review, Rating and Release: The question really is: Is the ‘dhai kilo ka haath’ still potent enough? And the answer to that, in this ultra long -ultra violent rant against Indian enemies , is a resounding yes . Sunny still has it .

That is the end towards which the star lends his considerable heft, scything through endless rows of ‘gaddars’ and goons, who come at him pretty much though the entire nearly 160-minute duration of Jaat, so that he can smack ‘em down.

Brigadier Baldev Pratap Singh aka Bulldozer uses all manner of weapons, from sophisticated bazookas with bullets long enough as his arms, to swords, sickles, and, when push comes to mighty shove, his bare hands, to keep them at bay, working his way to the chief antagonist Rana Thunga (Randeep Hooda) and the latter’s equally blood-thirsty brother (Vineet Kumar Singh). The only thing missing is the handpump.

But to make up for the crucial miss, an iconic hook in Sunny’s filmography, there’s enough dialoguing about ‘dharti’, ‘mitti’ and ‘watan’, with an old woman becoming the source of much-needed water for a grievously injured young woman, who is, of course, being carried by our hero, who declares he is a ‘kisan’ and a ‘jawan’, and, drumrolls, a Jat who belongs to the Jat regiment. In other words, he is invincible.

Hooda makes for a worthy villain, with a number of villages dotted along Andhra Pradesh’s coastline living in dread of his penchant for cutting off his victims’ heads. After a point I lost count of the number of heads that rolled, so much so that it could well have been dubbed Sar Katey Ka Aatank part 2.

Why Andhra? Because Sunny has to conquer the South, just like his contemporaries. Some rigmarole about the soil of the coastline being rich in elements that go into making an atom bomb (say what?) hatched in Davos, Switzerland (come again?) is proffered. But the filmmakers know, and we know, that it is all window-dressing: the real act is Sunny roaring, Sunny swinging, Sunny winning.

What happens when the ‘dhai kilo ka haath’ clashes with the headless horror? Set-pieces upon set-pieces of men hacking each other to pieces, with slit-eyed women (Regina Cassandra) joining in the fun, with a few dialogues thrown in just for the claps. That, shorn of all pretense of even attempting anything else, is what ‘Jaat’ coasts on.

Sacrificed at the altar of all that gruesome blood-letting and mutilated bodies hanging from the rafters and savaged women forced to huddle together is coherence and plot. The parts with the ripping-off-the-clothes and the lusty men setting upon the women are just plain ugly, reminding you of the high on melodrama-and-glycerine masala mish-mashes Bollywood used to churn out in the 70s and 80s. How many heads can you chop off? How many bodies can you stack up? We are left numb, unmoving, and desensitised in the dark.

The cops, like they used to in the bad flicks of yore, come last, because c’mon, Sunny has to come first. We’re here for the ‘haath’, but what about a better ‘paath’?

Jaat movie cast: Sunny Deol, Randeep Hooda, Vineet Kumar Singh, Regina Cassandra, Saiyami Kher
Jaat movie director: Gopichand Malineni
Jaat movie rating: 1.5 stars