Allow me, for a second, to exaggerate. The scene of the year, one whose memory will throb decades later, I hope, is Jaideep Ahlawat being introduced in this film. He is being given the bad news, while eating, that his younger brother was found by the roadside, dead. He is eating while this news is being digested. From the edge of the screen, a plate of chapatis is offered to him — you can see the hand, not the face — and you can sense that Bhoora wants to reach out for another chapati, but is also thrown by the news he just received, and torn by his reaction. Is this the first thing he does on receiving the news?
Ayushmann Khurrana, instead, is unable to grasp the edges of this larger than life figure as the film begins. A deafening background score, instead, keeps our attention unwavering. Even when he delivers punchlines, the camera is not offering a close-up, but a smooth swipe, sometimes just a shot of his car cruising along a coast to a bumping, rather devoid of personality, heroic rap. Does the film also recognize his limitations as an actor? When he is supposed to play the action hero — the action hero, not an action hero — bubbling with anger in his eyes, he is just not able to muster that compelling, exaggerated vein of blood. It made me wonder, have we ever seen Khurrana perform anger in a way that did not cement his common-man reputation? Because cinematic anger is grander, more obvious, more charismatic. It requires the voice, the stillness of a Bachchan, a Yash, a Rajinikanth, a Chiranjeevi. It is when the film requires him to be the common man in uncommon situations, forcing him to descend from the mass-hero to the urban-hero figure, that Khurrana shines, with that twinkle, that pale tiredness, that gait of hope in a hopeless situation.
You can ask, where are the women? There is Malaika Arora Khan in a cameo, playing a version of herself, a star forced to dance at the wedding of a don, and Nora Fatehi, who in a compressed rectangle dances on the side of the screen, as the credits roll on the other side. There is no mother, no wife, no sister, no daughter that is spotlighted. Neither Maanav nor Bhoora are given origin stories or desire. Neither needs explanation to exist. It is a film so engrossed in the present, it refuses to, even for a second, look back, massaging your empathy for its characters with a crutch-like flashback. Alternatively, it is a poignant note, of how the life of the action hero, the gangster, is ultimately so lonely, it yanks personality solely from the antagonists it concocts. That these two figures need a villain, in order to satiate that dull, lifeless shore on which they wait for some threatening wave.
Besides, the film does not need to give its protagonists a lover, for historically, Bombay cinema has shown us that when you have two men on screen — either as thick friends or throttling foes — the women, often, feel like forgotten afterthoughts, so potent is that homosocial throb. So, in An Action Hero, they don’t even try. Instead, all that expectant sexual tension is thrown at Maanav and Bhoora, wondering, if these two people who just want to get at each other’s throats, will, eventually, find reasons to hold hands, and not twist them, instead. This film gives Bhoora and Maanav the space to mount and dismount each other, grunt, growl, pummel, choke, stroke, scratch, pull, thrust, and thrum. For Bombay Cinema has cemented another grisly yet fascinating idea — that violence is its own form of love.
