Rohit Shetty’s Cop Universe Sequel

Scale is everything in Singham Again. The Hindi-language action film has eight stars, six screenwriters and three additional scribes who worked on dialogue, including director Rohit Shetty. The hardware on display is similarly expansive — there are battleships, helicopters, dozens of cars that get blown up and smashed. And weapons both large and small — missiles, guns, machetes.

At one point, Tiger Shroff brandishes the Urumi, an Indian sword with a whip-like blade which originated in modern-day Kerala. There is so much to fit in every frame that wide shots are the default mode, with Ravi Basrur’s score filling and underlining every beat. The ambition seems to be sensory overload.

Then there’s the story. Shetty’s Cop Universe, of which Singham Again is the fifth installment, is built on the idea of the police officer as superhero. His men — Singham (Ajay Devgn), Simmba (Ranveer Singh) and Sooryavanshi (Akshay Kumar) — are upright sons of the soil. (An additional female officer, Deepika Padukone’s Shakti Shetty, makes her entry in this film.) All of these characters are unblemished; while Simmba started as corrupt, he is now an honest officer and sworn ally of Singham.

These are steely, courageous law enforcement authorities who operate as their own judiciary. Encounter killings in these movies are not just routine, but celebrated.

In Singham Again, the cops are bestowed celestial status — the seeds for which were sown in 2011 with the first Singham, when Singham emerged from the temple tank as a deity. The latest film takes it further. The plot is inspired by the Ramayana, with a theatrical production of the Hindu epic being used as a framing device. What plays out on stage is echoed in real life.

Singham is a personification of Lord Ram, and his wife Avni (Kareena Kapoor Khan) of Sita. Simmba represents Lord Hanuman, ACP Satya (Shroff) is Lakshman, Sooryavanshi embodies Garuda, and so on. While Jackie Shroff is back as Omar Hafeez, the terrorist chief, the main agent of mischief this time is Arjun Kapoor’s Danger Lanka — who, naturally, describes himself as a modern-day Raavan.

These parallels are underlined again and again, as the characters journey to locations where the events of the Ramayana are said to have taken place. Subtlety has never been Shetty’s forte.

Nor is he a proponent of nuance, depth or progressive politics. When you go into Singham Again, you’re signing up for shrill patriotism and lectures on tradition and culture as well as exploding vehicles and a cheerful lack of logic. In one scene, one character says to another, you’ve been shot. The other replies not to worry, nothing will happen to me — which is exactly right, because gods might bleed in this story but it means little.

I’d be willing to make peace with all of it, but what rankles is the lack of entertainment. This film spends so much effort juggling star appearances, action sequences and Ramayana parallels that it forgets to deliver a cinematic high — a requisite for a larger-than-life, designed-for-whistles feature like this. Singh is the most playful and inventive of this gargantuan star cast, and just as he did in 2021’s Sooryavanshi, he brings in some buoyancy as Simmba. But Padukone gets a smashing entry and little else, as does Tiger Shroff. Avni is a damsel in distress — a pretty prop, like Katrina Kaif in Sooryavanshi. It’s a far cry from Kareena Kapoor Khan’s recent searing turn as a cop in The Buckingham Murders. 

Devgn, however, is back in his element as the man of granite. In my review of 2014’s Singham Returns, I described the character as Amitabh Bachchan’s Angry Young Man crossed with Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry, and Devgn works Singham’s supersized masculinity well. What Singham Again lacks, though, is a villain who can rival that. Arjun Kapoor works hard to summon menace, and he shows some spark, especially when he puts on a malevolent smile. But he is unable to evoke the same dread as Suriya’s Rolex in Vikram or Vijay Sethupathi’s Bhavani in Master.

While there are a few ambitious action set pieces, designed by Rohit and Mayyank Taandon, balancing the many actors proves too much a challenge, especially in the climax.

It’s telling that the best movies in the Cop Universe are remakes. Shetty’s first Singham was a reworking of the 2010 Tamil actioner Singam, starring Suriya. The second, Singham Returns, was loosely inspired by the 1993 Malayalam film Ekalavyan. Simmba was a reworking of the Telugu-language N. T. Rama Rao Jr.-starrer Temper. The two original entries — Sooryavanshi and Singham Again — are also the weakest.

It might be time for Shetty to seek inspiration in South Indian cinema again.