It’s no secret that mainstream Hindi cinema today is so empty that we tend to look at previous decades — and even their most middling movies — through rose-tinted lenses. It’s why so many of them become ‘cult classics’. A song here, a mood there. A brooder here, a plotline there. In that sense, Emraan Hashmi is the Vibe Resurgent. I mean 2000s Emraan Hashmi, but it goes without saying. As The Ba***ds of Bollywood recently surmised, it’s the only Hashmi that stopped time in the commercial landscape: the antihero blessed with a musicality that made his movies heard harder than they were seen.
In that sense, the nostalgia for Mohit Suri’s Awarapan (2007) is so strong that even a 140-minute-long slow-mo sequence of a smoking Hashmi striding towards the camera to the sound of ‘Toh Phir Aao’ would’ve done the job. Credit to director Nitin Kakkar and writer Bilal Siddiqi for conceiving a whole sequel around it to farm that aura. The moments that matter still revolve around the buildup and use of Pritam’s hits across love and violence; the rest is just narrative padding. It counts on our relationship with music and lyrics past, even though the original songs — like ‘Ve Junoon’ and ‘Yeh Awarapan’ — do well to cultivate some Saiyaara-coded soil.
I know Nostalgia Bait is not a compliment, but Awarapan 2 works hard to earn its payoffs and aesthetics. There’s a resurrection, a plot (sort of), new villains, a sad heroine who plays the cello, a new Bangkok. The bullets had one job, but Shivam Pandit didn’t die at the end of Awarapan. Nearly two decades later, Shivam is a retired gangster, living a grief-stricken life in a remote place that allows for silhouettes of his Enfield across the sunset. He visits the grave of Aaliyah, his beloved, whom he still longs for; you could call this Hashmi character a Serial Misser. Like any self-respecting ex-baddie, he cares for an orphanage.
As luck would have it, an incompetent Interpol officer (“my team is compromised”) unofficially enlists Shivam to bust a child-trafficking racket in Thailand. The stakes are personal for Shivam — he is attached to one particular kid — and thus begins his infiltration into an Indian mafia family that features three siblings in a succession battle, two loyal henchmen, and plenty of neon-lit angst. His only goal is to unshackle the 40 abducted children, but as is usually the case, he falls for the melancholic cello-playing daughter and struggles to stay undercover. Being a man can’t be easy. Every now and then, the film has to remind him that he’s there for the kids.
I like that, beneath all the pulp, Awarapan 2 retains the democratic spirit of its predecessor: “freeing an oppressed soul is freeing all of mankind”. The hero is activated by a personal crisis again, but he becomes a dark vigilante (the background score is his cape) who bats for cultural plurality. The premise cannot afford to be as secular, of course. Shivam Pandit’s fight to liberate a Pakistani couple in the first film — where Islam punctures his atheism — is replaced with a ‘safer’ conflict here. But it isn’t too sanitised: the amulet-donning loner sets out to liberate South Asian kids of multiple nations from the commercial clutches of Indian elders in a Buddhist nation. It’s an age-old crime-thriller motif of traumatised males saving children and women. But the timing is uncanny, if unintended: the kids aren’t old enough to protest yet, but they’re young enough to battle an establishment. Such movies don’t strive to be political (they're social at best), but their impact depends on how they reflect the times. There’s something about seeing the innocence of children stolen that hits harder at this point, even if it’s within the confines of a retro-gangster flick.
Of the supporting cast, Puran Gabbi chews the scenery as Zoravar, the most unhinged of the nepo-siblings. He updates the role of Purab Kohli from the original, playing Zoravar as a reptilian hybrid of Vijay Varma and Bad Bunny’s Mexican assassin in Bullet Train. The hamming is very watchable; there’s nothing quite like a performative antagonist who seems to have grown up watching seedy B-movies. I also like that Shivam Pandit is essentially a man cursed with immortality — “death is unfaithful to me,” he snarls in ways only Hashmi can, whenever Zoravar or a rival threatens to break him. He becomes invincible to atone for the sins of a former life, though the sequel offers him more: redemption. It’s amusing that his grief is age-appropriate; he imagines versions of his dead girlfriend (Shriya Saran) and best friend (Shaan Randhawa) as older people, not the faces they were.
But Bollywood’s favourite alt-star leans into this fan-servicing role, committing to the kind of dated emotions and recycled swag that could’ve gone woefully wrong a couple of years ago. It (mostly) works here, even though the action and chases across Bangkok seem to have made Thailand reconsider their visa rules for Indian tourists. Shivam simply arrives and starts wreaking havoc as a taxi driver, so who can blame them? Jokes aside, Hashmi sets the stage for another installment, but the time is ripe to reveal that Shivam has been a superhero all along without realising it. Unbreakable who?
It’s an odd thing to say, but Awarapan 2 remains effective within its cage because it does not pretend to escape. It exists to be cool, a lilting blast from the past, so it trusts its strengths. A bloated storyline is constructed to platform the Audible Feelings of 2007. The movie invests in its inheritance the second it begins: ‘Toh Phir Aao’ plays straight away in the re-intro montage, as if to assure the audience that they are here for the right reasons. The film weaponises the music throughout, toying with us by scoring scenes with opening riffs and stray notes — almost emulating Shivam’s sensory memories of a dead Aaliyah. As someone who used to be obsessed with the Awarapan soundtrack, I enjoyed this grief-fuelled relationship with sound. Especially the way ‘Tera Mera Rishta’ is used: the verse is repeated twice during an escape, building anticipation, until one is craving for the release of the hook. When the hook finally comes, it enriches an average set-piece of Shivam joining a group of monks. The hall erupted because they waited and waited. This interplay is all that Awarapan 2 — now a part of a music-video-shaped franchise — represents. It is all that Awarapan needs to be.