Nearly two decades after dying quite unambiguously at the end of the 2007 release Awarapan — they even held a memorial for him (in Pakistan!) — the ‘selfless angel’ of a gangster Shivam Pandit (played by Emraan Hashmi) is back in Awarapan 2. The new movie is designed almost exclusively for Hashmi’s cult fanbase and the odd passer-by with nothing better to do at the multiplex.
Remember, the first Awarapan was a flop; it gained a following thanks to multiple reruns on cable and Pritam’s evergreen music album. This time around, directing duties have been handed over to Nitin Kakkar, who simply doesn’t have the command over such material that original filmmaker Mohit Suri did.
Suri saw Hashmi like nobody else; through his lens, the actor was indistinguishable from the doomed protagonists of one of John Woo’s Hong Kong “heroic bloodshed” movies. Of course, the original Awarapan was also heavily inspired — that’s Bollywood-speak for blatantly plagiarised — by the South Korean hit A Bittersweet Life.
Surviving six bullets
In Kakkar’s hands, the sequel is a stylistically distinct affair. It’s an overlong, unevenly paced melodrama whose plot is identical to that of the Dhurandhar films, but with significantly more screen time devoted to emotional wallowing.
To get an idea of how fast and loose Kakkar plays with the idea of internal logic, look no further than the excuse he came up with for how Shivam cheats death. The movie simply has a man look Shivam dead in the eye and, for the benefit of the audience, declare, “Aur tum… tum 6 goliyan kha ke bhi bach gaye (You survived despite taking 6 bullets to the chest).”
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As it turns out, Shivam just… lived. When we catch up with him, he’s living a solitary life at an orphanage where he develops a bond with a young child named after his slain lover from the first film. When the child is kidnapped by Bangkok-based child traffickers, Shivam is compelled to go after them.
His mission is to infiltrate the crime ring by befriending its leader, a venomous young man who makes Purab Kohli’s categorically insane villain from the original look like a receptionist at a five-star hotel. Like Ranveer Singh’s character from Dhurandhar, Shivam scores brownie points by rescuing the crime lord from a rival gang’s ambush. Before long, he has been promoted to a high-ranking position in the organisation. And so begins Shivam’s search for the missing child. He discovers that Bangkok is run by two warring crime families: the one he works for, and another overseen by an old lady played by none other than Shabana Azmi.
In his free time, instead of going to have some pad kraphao on the streets of Bangkok’s Chinatown, Shivam goes to bare-knuckle boxing fights in a dingy alleyway. What else is a tortured Hashmi hero meant to do? “Dard se mera purana rishta hai (I have an old friendship with pain),” he says in a hoarse whisper when Disha Patani’s character — a golden-hearted heiress — asks him why he enjoys getting punched to a pulp. She doesn’t know half of it.
In Awarapan 2, Shivam is also buried alive in a pile of salt, which he escapes by digging himself out like the zombies in Night of the Living Dead. In another scene, he eats—there is no better word for it—a fistful of drugs simply because he is challenged to do so.
One for the fans
Awarapan 2 is written by Bilal Siddiqui, whose feelings for Hashmi are extremely unclear. He co-wrote the actor’s emotional memoir many years ago and then spearheaded the Netflix series Bard of Blood. But then, he brought some real Emraan-Hashmi-fan-club energy to another Netflix series, The Ba**ds of Bollywood. In many ways, Siddiqui is like Raghav Juyal’s character from that show — the die-hard “Emraanian” who begins singing “Kaho Na Kaho” at the mere sight of his idol.
But an “akkha Bollywood ek taraf, Emraan Hashmi ek taraf” (entire Bollywood vs Emraan Hashmi) attitude can only get you so far when your script is a hot mess. It takes real courage, for instance, to get a legend like Azmi to ask if a character has come to meet her “cocaine ka packet dene ya namak ka karz lautaane” (have they come to deliver the cocaine or to pay the debt of salt, or food).
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Awarapan 2 makes no mention of the atheism that was so critical to Shivam’s personality in the first movie. Sure, he is, in a way, rescued by divine intervention more than once in the sequel, but it isn’t the same thing as Shivam declaring in as many words that he does not believe in god. Nor does Awarapan 2 have one of those romantic subplots that are essential to a Hashmi experience. He begins developing feelings for Patani’s character, sings a guilt-ridden song about it and then swiftly moves on. Instead, he is visited by the ghost of his former love, played in a quick (but key) cameo by the returning Shriya Saran.
Although more attention is paid to the plot than it would in most other movies of this kind, attempting to explain what happens — all the double-crosses and triple-crosses, sneaky reveals and misdirections — is a fool’s errand. Does Awarapan 2 have the power to cure millennial malaise? Probably not. But does it power through by hurling the almost erotic opening notes of “Toh Phir Aao” at the audience on at least three occasions? Yes. Not a word can be said in favour of its story, the acting, or even Hashmi’s horrendous hairdo. Not enough, however, is said in appreciation of a bad film that exists purely to provide unreasonable cheer to its target audience.