Singham Again: Ramayana for Dumbos

Rohit Shetty assembles half of Bollywood, but forgets to assemble a coherent script.

Before watching Singham Again (or Singham 3), I was thinking about what exactly my expectations are. I started watching the trailer the day before my show, and it hadn’t gotten over by the time I left home to the theater. But this much I understood: it is going to be another Bollywood film trying to milk the Ramayana, the list of cameos is going to be so long that it goes like Hanuman’s tail (hey, look, I made a Ramayana reference too), and the film is going to hold no ground for subtlety. Now, none of this is a bad thing; Suryavanshi was also on the same lines, but the film had a lot going for it in terms of plot. 

Singham 3, however, is an empty vessel that makes noise—a lot of noise at that. The incessant background score is so filled with shlokas, if one wants to learn Sanskrit, you just have to play the soundtrack. If one half of the film is loud, ineffective background music played to slow motion walks from its stars, the other half of the film is absurd comparisons to Ramayana. This is not Shetty respectfully referring to the epic; it is him trying to make up for the lack of effort in his script. The bad news for me was that I grew tired by the third or fourth Ramayana parallel. The worst news was that there were hundreds. 

This is not something Shetty is incapable of pulling off: His better movies are carefree entertainers that don’t try to do much. And there’s proof of this here as well. The best portions of Singham Again are when Ranveer Singh makes an appearance as Simmba. The actor hams it up like nobody’s business, but many of his lines are genuinely funny, and Ranveer brings some much-needed energy into the proceedings. The other parts that work are when Singham Again remembers that, after all, this is an Ajaya Devgn film. In scenes where it’s just his story and not a gang-up of cameos, the actor has a great screen presence. (Genuine question to Ajay though: when will you stop comparing yourself to Lord Shiva? First of all, why are you doing this here? Aren’t you supposed to be Lord Ram?) In the rest of the scenes, he seems to have been handed over a sheet that says: WALK. 

Singham 3 is an easy festival watch, and there are no dull moments. It seems to be made solely to entertain, no matter how little sense it makes. At times, it also feels to be made to prove the existence of the Ramayana to people who question its reality. There is literally a line that goes something like “a lot of the people in the audience believe the Ramayana is fiction.” I felt bad for poor Kareena Kapoor, who is handed scenes like this and worse. I felt even more terrible for Deepika Padukone, who seems to have been handed over a sheet that says: ANNOY.

The film begins with a disclaimer that goes on for like fifteen minutes, and then, there are logos of so many companies, you wonder if you’re in an ad for the stock exchange. And it ends with an unnecessary cameo (even by this film’s standards). I read a report that said this cameo was shot just days before the release. It’s almost like the makers were wondering, “Hey, something is missing,” and decided, “Ah! Another cameo!,” instead of “Ah, the script!”