Tevar

Yet another tale of  the damsel in distress (Sonakshi Sinha), a powerful, eccentric goon who covets her (Manoj Bajpayee), a lower middle-class, one-man army hero (Arjun Kapoor) and an item number (Shruti Haasan).

The problem with the incessant and tedious remakes of South Indian movies (Telugu film Okkadu in this case) is the lack of anything original in them. Tevar ticks all the boxes on this repetitiveness chart and even goes one step ahead in the chart of irritation and mediocrity.

With a pair of lead actors comprising the acting abilities of a soft toy it’s not hard to guess right at the start that you’d rather end up playing games on your mobile phone soon after. Resembling a cuddly bear for the most part, Arjun acts, dances and fights goons for the total length of 2 and a half hours while the audience fights from falling to sleep. Sonakshi Sinha continues to exist in yet another movie that doesn’t require much for her to do. The saving grace as expected is Manoj Bajpayee who tries to make Gajendra Singh memorable by infusing a streak of humanity in the typical powerful goon role, shining specifically in scenes where he tries to woo Radhika.

Incessant fight set-ups punctuated with dance numbers form the majority of the movie. The songs are typical Sajid-Wajid affair with hardly a memorable track although foot-tapping enough. With lyrics like Ho Jaaye Marvel Tea ya Chai Har Lamha Naya Ho Jaaye wherein the second line is actually the tagline of the brand Marvel Tea, integrity towards the storyline is something you wouldn’t expect here. The suburban alleys of Agra and Mathura do form an interesting backdrop with the Taj Mahal forming a recurring background to the action but the debutant director Amit Sharma doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence in his abilities.

With the flopping of the enormously awful Action Jackson, and so far a not so enthusiastic response to Tevar, one prays that the days of Bollywood remakes of Southie films are numbered. Amen.

Hindi, Action, Drama, Color