Vikram Vedha: No, Hrithik Roshan, the movie isn’t too ‘cerebral’, it’s just convoluted

In an interview some months ago, Hrithik Roshan suggested that the reason why his new film Vikram Vedha ‘didn’t fare well at the box office at all’ was perhaps because it was too ‘cerebral’ for his fans. It wasn’t a tearjerker, he told Galatta Plus; nor did it offer his admirers any song and dance sequences, glamorous locations, or high emotion. He’s right on each account; Vikram Vedha, now out on JioCinema after an abnormally long wait, has none of that. But what the suave superstar neglected to mention was that it isn’t exactly Martin Scorsese-esque meditation on mortality either. The over-the-top Vikram Vedha didn’t put people off because they aren’t smart enough, but because the movie doesn’t consider them smart in the first place.

Directed by Pushkar-Gayatri, who also helmed 2017’s Tamil-language original, Vikram Vedha suffers from a Ponniyin Selvan problem. It’s a straightforward tale that gets tangled in a web of its own making. Movies like this are convinced that the audience is incapable of understanding dense narratives, which is why, having backed themselves against the wall, they force characters to verbally explain what’s happening. Nobody likes being spoken down to, especially when they aren’t really at fault. And when movies do this, it’s not only because they don’t have faith in the audience, it’s because they don’t have confidence in themselves. Which seems ironic, if you’ve taken one look at the protagonists.

Roshan plays Vedha, a charismatic gangster who operates out of Uttar Pradesh — we’ll tackle the film’s romanticisation of UP crime another day — and Saif Ali Khan plays the encounter specialist cop Vikram. The two engage in a cat-and-mouse game after Vedha surrenders before Vikram like John Doe from Se7en, only to make an elementary point about morality in the most elaborate manner. Over the course of its two-and-a-half hour run time, most of which unfolds in flashbacks, we’re shown how Vedha became the local Robin Hood figure, a symbol of resistance against a violent police force.

Characters do double takes when Vedha enters the scene, almost as if he is an expensive car. Each time he saunters into frame, he’s accompanied by a thunderous musical theme that could shake the very foundation of a multiplex. In fan club circles, music such as this is referred to as ‘BGM’. In fact, many of the keywords that were previously restricted to social media chatter about stars such as Vijay or Ram Charan, or directors such as SS Rajamouli, have now seeped into mainstream discourse about massy Indian movies in general. Audiences don’t want background scores, they want a ‘BGM’; they don’t want an engaging story, they want ‘elevation scenes’; films are no longer merely expected to do well at the box office, but crores are perpetually ‘loading’.

Unfortunately, the language of South Indian fan culture influences how those films are actually made. Mainstream Tamil and Telugu movies are happy to pander to the fandom of their stars, recover costs within the opening weekend, and immediately evaporate into obscurity. The issue with Hindi cinema isn’t that the films being made here aren’t ‘rooted’ or that they aren’t representative of the middle-class. People are happy to watch escapist spectacle like Pathaan when it’s well-made. The problem here is that most stars simply don’t have the juice any more to deliver that all-important opening.

Vikram Vedha is the kind of movie that counts on its plot to do the heavy lifting. But instead of taking you along for the ride by setting up stakes and offering resolutions, Pushkar-Gayatri would rather just tell you what’s happening by dumping a tonne of exposition on your head, as if they’re in a hurry get that beat out of the way. On several occasions, Vikram has important eureka moments, but this invariably happens after you’ve figured things out yourself. The movie skips past the building tension part, and jumps straight to the payoff, which, as a result, feels empty.

In one unintentionally hilarious moment, Vikram suddenly remembers how to do basic police work — like checking phone records and examining crime scene photographs — and if you didn’t know any better, you’d think that the movie is convinced he’s a genius. Of course, Vikram finds exactly what he’s looking for two seconds after doing this, which begs the question: why didn’t he do it sooner? Could the movie not think of a more complicated investigation technique for him to overlook? Did it have to be something as basic as yelling, “phone records laao” nearly two hours in, only to arrive at the conclusion that he was set up? We knew this already. I’m sure if you carefully break down some of the logic — how, for instance, does Vikram know that a key character is left-handed? — you’ll find plenty of holes. You go along with it only because the movie insists you must.

In spite of all this, Vikram Vedha appears to have its head screwed on straight when it comes to its stance on encounter killings, but this key theme is completely drowned out under all the sound and fury. Fables such as this are famously uncomplicated, but in the hands of Pushkar-Gayatri, Vikram Vedha’s ‘moral’ gets lost in the murkiness of its overcomplicated plot and its pointless posturing. These aren’t the signs of a cerebral story. And this is unfortunate, because ironically enough, Roshan’s performance is the best thing about the film.