Jigra, Review: JigrAlia

Though ‘jigar’ literally means liver in Hindustani, ‘jigra’ means courage, guts and gumption, essential qualities of a brave-heart. In an era of super-heroes and super-heroines, the title gives little away. So you try to relate the title to its star, Alia Bhatt. Having made a terrific impact with her performances in the last 2-3 years, you feel this might be a new avenue, an action showcase, for her considerable talent. You would not be far from the truth as you watch the fare that unfolds over the next 155 minutes after the pre-credits. However, it is case of overkill for the beautiful but frail-looking actress, with high cheek-bones. A complex plot, with many loose ends, finds her acquitting herself well, though the packaging leaves something to be desired. In other words, Jigra, produced by Karan Johar, two lady Bhatts, and a male Mishra, is a must for Alia fans, and a ‘maybe’ for discerning film-goers.

Jigra is about a girl named Satya (Satyabhama, in full), who is over-protective of her kid brother Ankit (Anku), and not just in sisterly, psychological terms. She is prone to taking any fellow student, who bugs him, hands on. Jigra is also about two orphan children who are adopted by a billionaire family, the Mehtanis, and treated as family. But it is also about their coming out in their true colours, once they face a situation that threatens the life their only child, and agree to send to the gallows, the kid brother, now grown up, for a crime he did not commit. Jigar is about a third generation Indian senior police officer, Hansraj Landa, in a foreign landa, sorry…land, who has no love lost for the land of his immigrant grand-father. But it is also about the East Asian trait of following laws in letter, and not in spirit.

Jigra is about another Indian ex-police-officer, Muthu, in the foreign land, who feels such pangs of guilt at having sent an honest person to death row that he resigns, and tries his best to get him released. But it is also about the same man, who will do his best to try his best to scuttle any plans that will release the guilty along with the innocent. Jigra is about an ex-gangster, Shekhar Bhatia, who wants his son out of jail, but has nothing but an outdated gun, without any bullets, to use as a weapon. But it is also about the same gangster teaming-up with Satya to carry out an incredible and preposterous plan to extract thousands of convicts from a maximum security island prison, with a plan that is nothing short of a military manoeuvre. There are more threads to the story, but let us not be spoiler-sports.

Though Vasan Bala is a name that has been heard since 2009, not too much is known about his co-writer, Debashish Irengbam. Click on the website www.debashishirengbam.com, and you will land nowhere. But you do learn, by searching his name, that Irengbam is a Mumbai-based scriptwriter, and a novelist as well. He has written episodes for TV crime-thrillers and youth-based shows, like Dil Dosti Dance, Adaalat, Aahat, Webbed and Gumrah. Debashish has also penned the novels Me, Mia, Multiple, and Charlie Next Door. Bala, on the other hand, is almost a veteran.

Having written the scripts for the period crime drama Bombay Velvet (2015), starring Karan Johar in a negative role, as Kaizad Khambatta, a flamboyant Parsee, and the psychological thriller Raman Raghav 2.0 (2016), Bala made his directorial debut with the crime thriller, Peddlers, in 2012, a film that he also wrote, which earned him a nomination for the Golden Camera Award, at Cannes. He's also worked as an assistant director to Anurag Kashyap, on films like Dev D. (2009) and Gulaal (2009), and Trishna (2011), which was adapted from Thomas Hardy’s ‘Tess of the D’Ubervilles’, an Indo-Swedish production, directed by Michael Winterbottom, having Anurag in its cast. The novel was first made into a Hindustani film in 1967, and titled Dulhan Ek Raat Ki. As a dialogue writer, Bala has contributed to The Lunchbox (2013, co-written with Ritesh Batra) and Rukh (2017). In 2019, came the film Mard Ko Dard Nahi Hota, an action comedy he wrote and directed. Drugs, a carry-over from Peddlers, appear as a peg in Jigra too, with the death penalty for offenders in a foreign land forming the backdrop of the story.

It is drugs that land Kabir Mehtani and Ankit in jail. I had heard that Singapore used to execute anybody found in possession of 10 gms or more of drugs. Here, though the sachet looks heavier, the drugs are said to weigh only 1 gm, and yet deserving of the highest sentence. Perhaps it is the framework of the novel style of writing that Debashish might have brought to the table that leads the film in different directions, and shifts focus. Flashbacks and back-stories are present when they are not really needed, as in the prison scenes, and missing, when they were mandatory, as in the deaths of the children’s parents. Attempts are made to relate the film to the ‘film within a film’ concept, by including at least three songs from Saregama’s repertoire, two of them from the film 50-year-old film, Zanjeer, which had only three songs, and another from Prem Pujari, written by Anand Bakhshi and partly re-written by Varun Grover. Both, the beginning and the end, drag the film, which is a costly oversight. Dragging of the drama, wherever it creeps into a movie, always gives rise to ennui, but is unpardonable in the beginning and the end, which have to be crisp and rivetting.

Two major scripting lapses are: the total absence of the billionaire Mehtani family from the narrative once Satya lands on foreign soil, and the lack of a hand-to-hand fight between the ‘villain’ police-officer and the yellow-belt holding Satya, who was denied the black belt in karaté for playing foul. Instead, we have Satya taking on a Chinky punk with a razor, and jamming the razor in his palm, a clever, bloody, move that is wasted on an insignificant escapade. Dialogue, like the moral tales of the frogs and the scorpions, and the mouse and the meal, fails to make the impact that it deserved, because the lines are mouthed at inappropriate times, by the wrong actors, in a rush. Frequent references to the Google search engine are realistic, but cannot be the base for elaborate plots to cut the power supply of an entire island. There is some doubt that the film is set in Hongkong (written in simplified Chinese, HanYuPinYin, as Xianggang and also known as Wade-Giles: Hsiang-kang), and the locale is given another Chinese name. It was shot, though, in Singapore, which, unlike Hongkong, has no ‘independence’ movement that could come to the rescue of duo on their mission, as is the case in the film. Plus, the preponderance of the “la”/ “lah”, in Singlish, a Singaporean (also Malaysian) speech crutch, is a sure pointer to S’pore.

The initial helplessness, and subsequent ease, with which Satya and Shekhar execute the plan, and the vital help they get from select police contacts and Malaysian Coast Guard, is too much to swallow. Likewise, the a-moral core of the story, counter-balanced in contrived doses by those who go by the book, result in a lengthy, patchy action encounter between Satya and Muthu, though it gives the film’s best visual freeze on screen. Director Bala is in his element, time and again, but is not consistent enough. Swapnil Sonawane’s camerawork is generally competent, with the subjective camera lunging of Satya across the wall and in the jail being well- conceived and executed. But there are some awkward frames too, that find Alia in the left corner, with the frame cutting at her nose. Likewise, editor Prerna Saigal imparts the film a racy pace, yet cannot find suitable cutting points in many a scene, which are going nowhere, in the first place.

Alia Bhatt will find her fan-base growing and thickening with Jigra. From cute to clever to philosopher to super-woman, bring her the roles, and her gusto seems to say, “bring them on.” One wishes the Jigra character was better rounded, though. Vedang Raina as Ankit is smooth and comfortable, even in awkward situations. Though the film has no romance or sex, prison routines do involve genital probes, and Vedang handles those scenes competently. Seen earlier as Reggie in Zoya Akhtar’s The Archies (2023), he is a singer too, and has sung the title track as well as the version of ‘Phoolon ka taaron ka’ from Prem Pujari. Now 24, Vedang reminisces on social media that when he was 10, would imagine himself in a packed arena, singing on stage, and a crowd cheering him on. We will see, and hear, more of Vedang. Meanwhile, the score in Jigra (Achint Thakkar) is sonorous, but a bit much, with many incomprehensible words.

All the actors have been given enough footage to make an impact. Aditya Nanda as Kabir, Manoj Pahwa as Shekhar Bhatia (experience shows through), Harssh A. Singh as Jaswant, Ankur Khanna as Rayyan (two of the death-row inmates), Rahul Ravindran as Muthu (better writing needed), Vivek Gomber as OIC (don’t ask me what the acronym stands for) Hansraj Landa (announcing the arrival of a new super-villain, a far cry from the Gujarati advocate he portrayed in much lauded Court-2014; it took ten years, but was worth the wait). The characters include cameos from Akansha Ranjan Kapoor as a flight attendant, Sikandar Kher, Radhika Madan, Abhimanyu Dassani, and Diljit Dosanjh, which are precisely that: cameos.

A more compact script, and a more credibly delineated character of the heroine, would have given Jigra the extra dose of guts that it needed to make a mark. As it stands, it is a draw between courage and gumption, with JigrAlia winning the encounter by a thin margin, on points

Rating: ** ½

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