Sadak 2 movie review
Cast: Alia Bhatt, Sanjay Dutt, Aditya Roy Kapur, Pooja Bhatt, Makrand Deshpande
Director: Mahesh Bhatt
Sanjay Dutt is involved, and maybe he’s the only one. As Sadak 2 wanders between fake slime and greedy families, while hitting the melodrama and the rest of the cast following in his footsteps, Sanjay Dutt really gets into the spirit of things. His Ravi is graying and shows his instincts, but that doesn’t stop him from coming face to face with the first baddie he sees. Don’t miss the smile on his face and the song on his lips as he does so. He brings the only moments of joy in this uniformly sad outing.
Watch the trailer for Sadak 2
The problem with Sadak 2 is that it is so deeply ingrained in the worst aspects of ’90s cinema that all the painful intensity and action from hell for Dutt’s leather cannot free him. It is very far from the excellent cinema that Mahesh Bhatt served us in his day; I’m talking about Naam and Zakhm, Arth and Daddy. Sadak 2 regurgitates the most cliché and exaggerated pulp that Bollywood threw in the decade and before.
The themes of death, suicide, and mental illness are ubiquitous in the film and treated with all the finesse of a bull in a china shop. Grieving for his lost love, Ravi de Sanjay constantly talks about a ‘meeting in heaven’ and often tries to act on it. The only time his friend manages to drag him to the hospital, the doctor asks him what he would do if his house caught fire. Your answer involves a can of gasoline. Aarya from Alia Bhatt, who is trying to unmask a ‘dhongi baba’ named Gyaan Prakash (Makrand Deshpande), is quickly labeled insane and sent to the same doctor. It is even mentioned that she was threatened with electric shock therapy!
Sadak 2 Review: Despite Sanjay Dutt’s presence on screen, the movie doesn’t hold you back.
Written by Mahesh Bhatt and Suhrita Sengupta, the film seems dated from the start. Makrand Deshpande’s clipping of a religious ceremony straight out of a Dan Brown book. This is perhaps the only time that we really see anything remotely related to religion or faith. Alia spray paints the word ‘revenge’ on the cutout before setting it on fire. In the midst of this private Dussehra, the baba’s henchmen pursue her and she ends up in said hospital.
An heiress, Alia flees from the false slime, an ungainly phrase, it does not help how many times the film says it, who also has her hooks in her family: father Yogesh (Jisshu Sengupta) and stepmother Nandini. (Priyanka Bose). She hires Ravi, who pines for her lost love (Pooja Bhatt, seen only in portraits), to take her to Kailash to fulfill a promise she made to her dead mother. Accompanying the walk is her boyfriend (Aditya Roy Kapur). What follows are more twists than you’d see even in an Abbas-Mustan movie, and each one is more fun than the last, ultimately leading us to one of the most chilling climaxes of any movie this year.
Many veterans also made an appearance: Gulshan Grover as Dilip Hathkata and Mohan Joshi as a corrupt police officer Rajesh. Heavy with the heavy story and slow pacing, neither of them add much to Sadak 2. Even the naturally gifted Alia Bhatt fails to rise above the expository dialogue and leaden narrative.
Assemblies of the original Sadak, interspersed through this iteration, let’s never forget how undercooked this product is. And then there are the self-referential nods: Makrand’s slime appears in drag, as a nod to Sadashiv Amrapurkar’s iconic Maharani from the first film, perhaps. It looks like a cheap knockoff, very much like this movie.
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