There’s no denying that Bollywood action hero Vidyut Jammwal is strikingly good at hand-to-hand combat. His ripped torso and sinewy arms seems to have a life of its own, but that vibrancy wasn’t reflected in its story or in the way the characters were fleshed out in Commando 2: The Black Money Trail.
The hero (a brawny Jammwal), the vamp (a heavily made-up femme fatale Esha Gupta) and a string of forgettable baddies are reduced to stock characters.
Jammwal returns as Captain Karanvir Singh, a valiant saviour of the poor and the distressed, in the second instalment from the Commando series. He’s in charge of bringing in the leader of an international money laundering ring from Malaysia to India. But the mission to obliterate an illicit money laundering ring takes a sinister turn when he meet his match in the lawbreakers.
While it’s delightful to see Jammwal ferociously use his body strength to demolish his enemies, it’s the cheesy dialogues that weigh this film down. For every neat stunt — like his body sliding through a narrow window — a door filled with cliched punch lines popped open.
Villains making bombastic threats and police officers who speak like they belong in a reality show don’t help. While we all know that the hero has to ultimately save the day in a Hindi film, was there a need to present his colleague, Adah Sharma, as a dimwit with a heavy Hyderabad accent?
Her job was primarily to make the hero look like the brightest bulb in the class and to provide the occasional comic relief. But her attempts at evoking that laugh were cloying and her clownish demeanour wasn’t particularly endearing either.
Gupta, with her dark-stained lips and vertiginous heels, was your token unscrupulous siren with a designer wardrobe that could save a nation.
But the brisk pace sits well with this action drama. The web of double-crossing and lies come swiftly. The bright spot in this fight-fuelled drama is Jammwal, whose blows pack a punch. Watch this only if you are a fan of body combat and bloody fist fights.
Language: Hindi
Run time: 135 minutes
Director: Deven Bhojani
Rating: PG15
Cast: Vidyut Jammwal, Adah Sharma and Esha Gupta
GN Rating: 2 out of 5.
