Despite Sanjay Dutt’s performance ‘Sadak 2’ fails to impress

Believe it or not, Gulshan Grover in a walk-on part which he must have accepted for  old times’ sake, plays a villain named Haathkatta. Because, get this, one of his hands has been severed.

Subtlety is certainly not one of the strong points of this belated sequel to a 1991 film that was ripped off from Martin Scorcese’s Taxi Driver. This Sadak swerves off the  highway in no time at  all. It is shocking that a script so shoddy and inane would be allowed to serve as a comeback to direction for  Mahesh Bhatt, and that too to direct his star-daughter Alia Bhatt.

Both deserve better. So does Sanjay Dutt. So do we.

Sadak2 is the kind of debilitating disappointment that Indian cinema suffers when  the biggest of talents get together to deliver a certifiable  dud.  It happened when Kamal Amrohi made Razia Sultan or more recently when Yash Raj films  made Thugs Of Hindustan.

What makes a truckload  of talented  people go on a suicidal  mission destined to be doomed from the day someone suggested it?

I can see someone from Mahesh Bhatt’s team suggesting Sadak 2. “Let’s bring Baba back, Sanju Baba. To battle the fraud religious Baba. Let’s sign Makarand Deshpande to play the fraud Godbaba.”

Right. Got that.  What else?  Fatally  the Sadak2 writers forgot to join the dots in  the screenplay. Most of the narrative lurches forward like a rudderless ship heaving  to a bland finale that could give Lord Of The Rings  The Return Of  The  King competition for the worst movie climax of the year.

But that’s at the end. See if you can survive the onslaught of incoherence that Sadak 2 heaps on from  the opening (Alia Bhatt  burning down a godman’s  poster) like indigestible food at a  wedding banquet. You know it’s probably going to kill  you. But what the  hell! You cling on to the cornball thrills in the hope they would mend their ways and start behaving themselves.

But no. Till the end Sadak 2 behaves like an errant child that insists on embarrassing the guests  who have come home for dinner. The action scenes are laughably clumsy and  the acting , barring  Sanjay Dutt who has a naturally  grieving face,  is amateurish , and that includes seasoned Bengali actors Jisshu Sengupta and  Priyanka Bose. As Alia’s  neurotic parents  they behave like a couple on Bigg Boss hellbent on outdoing each other’s bad behaviour.

Makarand Deshpande as the imposter guru is a howl. Was he closet-funny while pretending to be sinister? In the end he suddenly dons a saree to remind us of Sadashiv Amrapurkar’s  vicious transgender villain in Sadak Part 1.

Alia Bhatt  looks bewildered most of the time, coming alive in her closing monologue on fraudulent  godmen. Both  Dutt and Alia  are suicidal characters, though probably not as much as the makers  of this film. Sadak 2 is  our worst nightmare come true. A  film whose very presence endorses the nepotism debate.