Vidyut Jammwal in a nonetheless from Khuda Haafiz 2 – Agni Pariksha trailer. (courtesy: Panorama Studios,
Forged: Vidyut Jammwal and Shivaleeka Oberoi
Director: Faruk Kabir
Score: 2 and a half stars (out of 5)
Vidyut Jammwal is certainly one of a handful of Bollywood actors who genuinely match the outline of an motion hero. He has the physique and the display screen presence to persuade the viewers that he possesses the power and endurance to drag off hand-to-hand fight with out sustaining too many everlasting scratches. The style rests on make-believe. It really works greatest when an actor can bolster the pretence of invincibility.
Jammwal’s presence, nonetheless, isn’t the one purpose why Khuda Haafiz: Chapter 2 – Agni Parikshawherein he reprises the function of Sameer Chaudhary who was the primary time round willy-nilly drawn right into a bloody confrontation with flesh merchants in an alien land, passes muster regardless of a predictable storyline.
Director Faruk Kabir, who can be the author of the movie, demonstrates a reasonably regular hand as he mounts an motion movie that makes good use of emotional flashpoints. Elements of the two-and-a-half-hour-long Khuda Haafiz: Chapter 2 really feel a tad superfluous however the total arc of the narrative is orchestrated to ship a movie that may be a marked enchancment on its predecessor.
The primary half of the movie is considerably higher than the second, however Khuda Haafiz: Chapter 2 scores persistently with its motion choreography and versatile camerawork (Jitan Harmeet Singh). What’s most noteworthy is that it doesn’t hustle itself into motion mode with out constructing a sufficiently robust emotional and psychological bulwark for the formulation of the male protagonist’s vengeful avatar. The screenplay facilities on a Lucknow man who’s pressured to take the regulation into his personal palms when his adopted daughter goes lacking and the police and a ruthless feminine crime boss do every little thing of their energy (which, in fact, is aware of no bounds) to cease him.
Khuda Haafiz: Chapter 2 – Agni Pariksha is an actioner that delivers a robust first-half build-up that paves the way in which for an all-out post-interval campaign by the protagonist towards the criminals and their accomplices, in uniform or in any other case.
In essence, there’s little that’s new on this one man-against-a-broken-system assemble. Worse, the movie fully gratuitously alludes to a Ram Rajya beneath menace, for which it introduces a sermonising (and eminently dispensable) tv journalist who tells us how and why ours isn’t any nation for girls.
The hero corners the criminals one after the other. He barges right into a key perpetrator’s locality, a colony of butchers the place his manner is blocked by males armed with meat cleavers. As any person says earlier within the movie, when a person has nothing left to lose, he has no worry. With Jammwal taking part in that man, it isn’t troublesome to consider that he would stroll into harmful terrain and never flip right into a lamb to the slaughter.
On the flip facet, just a few of the supporting characters in Khuda Haafiz: Chapter 2 – they’re performed by achieved actors like Rajesh Tailang, Danish Hussain and Dibyendu Bhattacharya – get the brief shrift. Their entry scenes seem promising sufficient however because the revenge saga unfolds, they’re lowered to mere footnotes.
The one who mercifully is not – Sheeba Chaddha within the function of a ruthless law-breaker decided to guard her rapist-grandson – provides a layer to the movie that flip it into one thing that’s appreciably greater than the motion film template it adopts. The veteran actress doesn’t have to boost her voice to exude menace and authority – she hisses out her orders and strategies with telling impact.
Taking off from the place Khuda Haafiz, which was launched on a streaming platform in 2020 when cinema halls had been nonetheless shuttered, left, the brand new movie, out within the theaters, captures the delicate mind-set of the hero’s spouse. Within the first movie, set in 2007-2008 in a world grappling with a monetary slowdown, she was kidnapped by flesh merchants and gangraped in a fictional Center Japanese nation.
The nightmare nonetheless haunts her and she or he is beneath remedy for despair. A semblance of pleasure returns to the lifetime of Sameer (Jammwal) and Nargis (Shivaleeka Oberoi, who does a good job of conveying the anguish of a gangrape survivor) when a five-year-old woman comes into their lives and completes the household. However their happiness doesn’t final very lengthy – little Nandini is kidnapped together with an older woman from outdoors their faculty.
Sameer, a middle-class businessman going by the motions of life and dealing with a spouse who requires fixed care, swings into motion when the Lucknow police refuse to behave regardless of the rising stress of public opinion and questions raised repeatedly by a veteran tv journalist ( Tailang).
Sameer leads to jail regardless of the decide observing that the aggrieved father’s ire is comprehensible. Contained in the jail, he’s befriended by a gang lord (Hussain), who reveals him the way in which to go about his revenge mission. An extended, graphically violent, powerfully choreographed motion sequence pits him towards an attacker who has been deployed to eradicate him.
Khuda Haafiz: Chapter 2 ends in Egypt, the place the younger man he’s pursuing is in hiding. The violence the hero perpetrates is horrifying – it’s alleged to mirror the depth of his despair and the depth of his anger.
This character, in contrast to Jammwal’s Commando persona, isnt a skilled fighter.Sameer Chaudhary isnt given to the sort of bluster that revenge-seekers normally resort to in Hindi movies. He doesn’t need to take off his shirt to flash a six-pack to instill worry in his adversaries. If something, he’s a silent, brooding, largely undemonstrative man who’s drawn into conditions he would have prevented if he might. However when he’s at it, his strategies are brutal and swift.
In step with the direct and fast methods of the protagonist, barring the jail brawl sequence, not one of the scenes performs out too lengthy. Even the chases are staged with a welcome contact of minimalism, uncommon for an motion movie fronted by a ‘powerful man’ actor. Undoubtedly not the sort of cinematic trial by hearth that many such movies may be, Khuda Haafiz: Chapter 2 – Agni Pariksha in all fairness watchable.