MOVIE REVIEW
movie review
Jai Gangaajal
I
n his latest foray into India's dusty political badlands,
director Prakash Jha parades an entire array of reprehensible goons out for their pound of flesh.But the
tough-cop heroine of Jai Gangaajal is up against more
than just individual law-breakers.Her ire has a larger
context: it is directed at an entire system that is completely at the mercy of the high and mighty. Jai Gangaajal has only tenuous links with the 2003 cop drama that it
is meant to be a sequel to. Neither its characters nor its
plot borrow anything at all from Gangaajal. It does touch
upon the question of mob violence and instant justice,
but there are hangings instead of blindings here. It also,
in the process, addresses a whole lot of other issues:
land rights, farmer suicides, ugly politics and police corruption. For good measure, the plot has a PhD degree
holder (Rahul Bhat in a special appearance) who has
chucked up a high paying job in the US to throw his lot
behind the poor landowners whose future is under grave
threat from big industry. Despite the topical themes it
tackles and all the supercharged action that unfolds on
the screen, Jai Gangaajal never really kicks into top
gear. There is little in the film's good-cops-bad-cops construct that has not been seen before in Hindi cinema,
especially in Jha's own previous films. Jai Gangaajal is
a trite, if not entirely unexciting, drama in which the police force is always on the back foot and the land mafia
and their political masters call the shots. The tables turn
just a touch when superintendent of police Abha Mathur
takes charge of Bankipur district, the first female officer
to do so. The district is in the vice-like grip وH