Baaghi 4 Review: Tiger Shroff Stars In The Worst Movie Of The Year

Before analysing Baaghi 4 I googled the budget of this Tiger Shroff film. Much like other data in Bollywood, there is no way to confirm the exact figures but estimates on some entertainment portals swing wildly between Rs 70 crore and Rs 200 crore (approx. Dh30.8 million-Dh88 million).

Whatever be the actual amount, after surviving the movie, I can safely guess that three-fourths of the money was spent on fake blood. There is a flood of blood on screen and most of it's so unnecessary, it looks like the makers received a discount on bulk purchase. The rest would have been spent on actors' fees with the leftovers being rounded off for VFX. Not surprisingly, there would not have been even a dirham left for writers. If you are brave enough to view this piece of cinema, you will realise that every scene, dialogue and twist appears to have written itself out.

Let's be honest - no one expected anything from Baaghi 4. This is an action franchise bankrolled by Sajid Nadiadwala, the same man who inflicted yet another brain-dead Housefull installment on us earlier this year. Like Housefull 5A and 5B, this film also credits him for story and screenplay so you can't say you weren't warned! Baaghi stumbled into success when its earlier chapters clicked at the box office with part 2 earning blockbuster status. And so here we are at round four, with Tiger Shroff once again in the lead, though the film, like most sequels, bears no real continuity or connection to its predecessors. The real irritation comes when, even with rock-bottom expectations, a flick still manages to test every last shred of your patience.

Tiger plays Ronnie, a defence officer waking up from coma after an accident and pining for his allegedly dead girlfriend Alisha (Harnaaz Sandhu), a sweet and simple orphaned doctor. Angry bird Ronnie is determined to find what happened to Alisha but the problem is no one around him seems to know who she is. He is told he suffers from hallucinations and even people supposedly associated with Alisha deny her existence. The frustration of not knowing the truth takes a toll on Ronnie, reflected in a lot of screaming and fighting. Ronnie fights cops, mysterious masked men, his own brother (poor Shreyas Talpade in a thankless role), street goons... just about everyone. The only person who he slightly connects with is a dancer, Olivia, (Sonam Bajwa) but as it turns out even she is not who she is.

So who's actually behind the mayhem? Who is trying to frame Ronnie and what has actually happened to Alisha? The violent trail leads to a strange character, a man named Chacko (a snarling Sanjay Dutt) who has an army of minions led by right hand man, Paulo, (Saurabh Sachdev, reprising his Animal role) spread out to beat Ronnie to a pulp. The motive is a love story featuring a lookalike which gets resolved with some divine help. (Hint: if you are a lover of old B-grade horror, you would recognise the climax as strikingly similar to any of the Ramsay Brothers' films!).

The internet tells me this film is an unofficial remake of a 2013 Tamil film but frankly, the plot is irrelevant. What matters is that it drags on for 2 hours and 43 minutes - easily the longest you'll feel trapped in a theater in recent memory. The first hour and a half is squandered on Ronnie's hallucinations, with abrupt, clumsy sequences that alternately hint at and then conceal the truth about Alisha's fate. The remainder attempts to tie these fragments together, but the execution is so shoddy it feels as if random scenes were stitched together in haste to deliver a flimsy excuse for a narrative.

The less said about the characterisation and acting the better. Tiger is still hampered by limited expressions but I was truly amused by Sanjay Dutt's performance. The Munnabhai star looks clearly bored. The story does not reveal what Chacko does or why he is so evil but he proudly declares himself to be a devil with a cackling laugh to prove his credentials. Then there is Harnaaz Sandhu, playing his love interest Avantika, introduced without any context in a sizzling bikini song similar to Pathan's Besharam Rang. The 40+ (yes!) age difference between the duo is explained in a throwaway line. Avantika is a weird woman who chops the hands of the man who touches her and carries the body part like a purse. But then she is a badass girl who also craves for a wedding; there is a sequence where she is dressed as a bride with a lothario-like Chacko looking dreamily at her. Avantika resembles Alisha but they are not long-lost twin sisters. They just look similar, that's all. Keeping in tune with Bollywood's current fascination for CGI wild animals (we saw a wolf in War 2), one shot shows Alisha waking up to a tiger (not Shroff, but the animal) next to her. Sonam Bajwa is a dancer with ulterior motives but turns catwoman as she fights goons dressed as chefs in a restaurant kitchen to save Ronnie. Both ladies are just glam dolls with badly written and terribly performed roles.

All this chaos unfolds amid mind-numbing violence, amplified by loud, screechy background music. Since action has always been the Baaghi franchise's calling card, it deserves a closer look but the set pieces here are painfully generic and relentlessly gory. Severed heads, chopped limbs and blood-dripping butcher knives leave nothing to the imagination. At least two sequences - one in Ronnie's hallucinations, another in a decrepit bungalow - feature men in metal masks wreaking havoc, a blatant lift from Animal. Tiger is stabbed, shot, and assaulted with an arsenal of weapons, yet he shrugs it all off by flexing his muscles and yanking out bullets and knives as though they were toothpicks. But it's the final fight between Tiger and Sanjay that is laughably juvenile with both actors simply indulging in fist fights and grunting loudly by turn.

Baaghi 4 has many such unbelievable scenes, but the best is for the last when our lead pair pay homage to the villain who has been laid to rest with an unintentionally funny epitaph! I guess that says it all. As reviewers, we can't obviously advise Bollywood stars on what they should or should not do. What we can reveal is the word that comes to mind after watching films like Baaghi 4 - it's just Bhaago (run!).

Movie name: Baaghi 4

Cast: Tiger Shroff, Sanjay Dutt, Sonam Bajwa

Directed by: A Harsha

Rating: 1 out of 5

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