Spoilers ahead…
An indigenous superhero who isn’t just generically Indian but a Sikh? Part of me says “What an idea, sir-ji,” while the other part wonders if what we need now is the celebration – rather, valourisation – of specific communities as saviours. (Whatever next? Captain Arora? Iyer Man?) But at least for a while, it’s easy to buy into A Flying Jatt, an origins story about a mild-mannered martial arts instructor Aman (Tiger Shroff) being imbued with special powers and transforming into the airborne Sardar of the title. Consider Aman’s costume, in the Sikh colours of blue/yellow and displaying the Khalsa symbol. It’s not the most elegant fit. It doesn’t define the contours of his body the way the costumes of American superheroes do. There’s a big, fat zipper down the back. The fingerless gloves have no hemming. But these rough edges are endearing, for this is a costume Aman’s mother (a spirited Amrita Singh) put together on her Usha sewing machine, as though her son were in the school play. It’s the superhero version of the doting Indian mother who’d welcome her son with a spoonful of gajar ka halwa, and it’s fun to see a mother so involved in her son’s “career.” And why not? Given his flying powers, how much easier it is now to ask him to pick up some vegetables. Of course, you wish she’d remembered to sew pockets on the outfit, so Aman could carry some money along. How embarrassing to descend grandly from the sky and then discover you cannot pay for do kilo lauki.
Parts of A Flying Jatt are genuinely sweet, and targeted at children (or the child in you that laughs when Aman grabs a rotund villain by the waist, only to have the latter fart under the super-pressure). There’s the scene where Aman uses his nunchaku to deflect balls hurled at him from a bowling machine. There’s the scene where Aman (who’s scared of heights) flies low enough to greet the people from his village, as though he were just cycling along lazily and waving to friends and neighbours. These scenes have a woozy, homespun charm, and we are repeatedly reminded of the low stakes. (Aman puts on his costume, touches his mother’s feet as the music swells, and… plops back on his bed with the remote.) No new ground is being broken here – forget being derivative; things get down to copyright-infringement levels when the film rips off the frozen-in-time scenes involving Quicksilver in the recent X-Men adventures – but the goofiness keeps things going. I especially enjoyed the running gag with Aman’s brother Rohit (a very funny Gaurav Pandey) getting to don the superhero costume. Every time, it’s a disaster.
I’d have been happy with a silly superhero movie, a real change from the unrelenting machismo we get from Hollywood’s offerings in this genre – but alas, there is a villain. No, not Kay Kay Menon, who plays an industrialist with a preference for ties that look like they’ve been assembled from shards of bathroom tiles. I refer to Raka (the seven-feet-tall wrestler Nathan Jones), a mythical/allegorical creature created from garbage. The more we trash the earth, the stronger he becomes. I wondered about the animated film that played over the opening credits, laying out the consequences of felling one tree and how the Flying Jatt reverses the ecological damage that follows – as it turns out, this is a compressed version of the story ahead. A Flying Jatt is the world’s first environmental-PSA-disguised-as-a-superhero-film, and it makes sense that the superpower-giver isn’t a god (as in Shiva Ka Insaaf, where Tiger’s dad played a superhero trained by men named Ram, Robert and Rahim, representing the major Indian religions; his weapon was a ring endowed with the powers of Shiva’s third eye) but a 200-year-old tree. In this film, green is god.
All of this is too much to entrust to Remo D’Souza, the director of the ABCD films. Yes, the writers are also to blame. They keep throwing at us groaning messages about keeping our surroundings clean, and they kill off a major character without realising this is completely at odds with the tone of the film. We’re caught off-guard: from silly to super-serious, faster than a speeding bullet. (Tiger Shroff, as always, moves like a dream, but he’s not an actor you want to hang a serious film on.) Every time A Flying Jatt lunges for drama, its gaping flaws are exposed. A number of contrivances are brought up – Aman begins to hear voices of those in pain; he is ashamed of being a Sikh – but not resolved with conviction. D’Souza’s staging is awful. After Rustom and A Flying Jatt, I wouldn’t be surprised if film schools in the country started new classes like ‘Reaction Shots 1o1’ and ‘How To Film A Crowd Scene Without Making People Look Like They Were Caught In The Shower’. But why blame the extras when we have Nathan Jones, determined to reduce every scene to two simple actions (open mouth wide; bellow), and Jacqueline Fernandez as a ditzy schoolteacher? (In her inexplicable accent, Waheguru sounds like a psychedelic rock band.) Did I mention A Flying Jatt was 151 minutes long? After a point, my body was making up its own movie: A Crying Butt.
KEY:
- Jatt = see here
- gajar ka halwa = carrot halwa
- do kilo lauki = two kilos of bottlegourd
- the recent X-Men adventures = see here; and here
- Shiva Ka Insaaf = see here
- ABCD films = see here
- Waheguru = see here
Copyright ©2016 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.
Deepak
August 26, 2016
Crying butt! Classic! I guess the sequel would be called Flying Jatt: Jatt happens! 🙂
Although putting on my pedant hat I would say Captain Planet was the first Environmental PSA disguised as a superhero (I know you said world’s first environmental-PSA-disguised-as-a-superhero-film) and Captain planet was a TV show, but still.
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Ramsu
August 26, 2016
Iyer Man? I like it. Does he wear his komanam outside his panchakacham and use his angavastram as a cape? Oh, the possibilities!
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Akhilan
August 26, 2016
And so much for Jaqueline Fernandez saying she’s ‘actively seeking’ roles with more substance and meat…
Brownie points for the last 2-3 sentences BR… At your hilarious best…
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Anu
August 26, 2016
@BR, thanks for the mid-morning smiles.
Tiger does grow on you – sort of – and his father too was known as a handsome block of wood until he seemingly matured into a competent actor, but honestly, what’s with ‘manly’ heroes who look like their mothers and sound like the fathers? Somehow, seeing Tiger and Ranbir Kapoor always gives me that feeling of dissonance.
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venkatesh
August 26, 2016
What a crying shame?
This could have been so much more and the Tiger seems to be growing on me.
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Abhirup
August 26, 2016
Like you, I too liked some parts of the movie very much. It would probably have been even better if they had made up their mind if they were going to make their superhero genuinely Sikh/desi, or more along the lines of the western superheroes. I mean, most of the movie is cobbled together from western superhero movies anyway. Like Superman, the Flying Jatt is immensely strong and can fly; like Wolveine and the Hulk, his injuries heal instantly; like Daredevil and Spiderman, his senses are so developed he can even hear voices of people far away. Indeed, the whole “shy guy whom nobody takes seriously turns into superhero” is also from Spiderman, and the scenes portraying his bewilderment upon realizing he has superpowers are very similar to Peter Parker’s realization of the same in the first Spiderman movie with Tobey Maguire as Spiderman. Even the blue-and-yellow costume has similarities with what Wolverine wears in some comic books, as well as Nightwing’s outfit. The preserve-the-environment bit is from Captain Planet. Raka is an amalgamation of two of Batman’s antagonists–Bane (bald and brawny like Raka; plus, the costume Raka later wears is also like Bane’s) and Joker (whose transformation into a psychopath happens once he falls, like Raka, into a vat of toxic substances). Raka gets stronger due to pollution, much like Captain Pollution, Captain Planet’s chief enemy. The fight on the moon is from ‘Superman IV’. Even the self-referential bit, where Aman is being coached in superhero behaviour through DVDS of those movies, may be influenced by Deadpool, where such cheeky self-references are plenty.
Given such enormous reliance of western superhero movies, was there at all any need for the Sikhism bits? To me at least, they seemed forced. The whole lecture about what “Sardar ke barah baaj gaye” means is so unnecessary; it is there only as a “don’t laugh at Sikhs” lesson. Then there is the Flying Jatt killing Raka with his kada, which he was wearing all along but didn’t use before, and which had not had any trace of the magical before the climactic fight. Okay, this is all make-believe, but even that has to have its logic, please. If you want to kill the antagonist with the kada, you have to first establish it as something capable of doing so. You cannot suddenly make it a weapon in a bid to be Sikh-friendly.
In the end, it would have been better if they had decided if they want a Sikh hero or simply a Superman portrayed by Indian actor.
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Iswarya
August 27, 2016
BR: Reg. “valourisation” – this is THE first time I am seeing that distinctly British spelling of the word. Cue happy dance
Had turned sick of the word having seen only “valorized” in all those annoying Americanized books on Theory. Thanks for salvaging that word for me, which was especially surprising since I had long ago become resigned to your Americanisms.
CC: Anu Warrier 😉
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Maddy
August 27, 2016
@Iswarya lol. Totally agree with you. Very well said.
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Kay
August 27, 2016
it is funny. India is the land of Shreemad Bhagvat, Ramayan and Mahabharat. Volumes that are full of superheros, villains and flying vehicles (not just the chariots) and weapons that can fire of hundreds of arrows. Way before the west wrote their superheros in comic books. And yet the movie industry cannot make a decent superhero movie. We do not even make decent movies for children except for some recent animated version of Hanuman, Krishna etc…
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Honest Raj (formerly 'V'enkatesh)
August 27, 2016
Kay: Because for most Indians, mythology is an archaic term for history.
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Anu Warrier
August 28, 2016
Iswarya, laughing at that. Can I list my pet peeves here? 😉
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Ravi K
August 28, 2016
Kay, the modern avatar of those stories is the hero-centric movies in which one man singlehandedly vanquishes evil. Many of those are entertaining, but Indian filmmakers are out of their wheelhouse when they make films directly inspired by Western superhero films. The former work on their own terms because there’s no polished Hollywood equivalent, but these Western-style Indian superheroes suffer in comparison to Marvel and DC movies.
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brangan
August 28, 2016
To add to Ravi K’s points, the hero-centric masala movie — where he vanquishes the demon-like villain/oppressor — already exists, especially in Tamil and Telugu cinema. So when a Rajinikanth, even in human form, can beat up 20 men all at once, the need for “superpowers” becomes redundant.
I wrote about this in my column about the Tamil superhero film Kandasamy:
“We don’t question, for an instant, how Rajinikanth lifts up a leg and twirls it so fast that he whips up a tornado that flattens his opponents – that is, after all, the prerogative of the mass-hero – but here, we’re asked to buy into the deconstruction of the mass-hero.
We’re shown that Kandasamy can never be who he is without the assistance of a dozen others who operate mechanical contraptions that allow him to fly and fight.”
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Kay
August 28, 2016
American super heros were conceived by American comic book writers. May be that is what is needed, an original comic book writer that can imagine an original Indian superhero.
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