‘Agni’ Movie Review: Pratik Gandhi's Firefighter Drama Forgets To Escape Its Own Flames

Director: Rahul Dholakia
Writers: Rahul Dholakia, Vijay Maurya (dialogue)
Cast: Pratik Gandhi, Divyenndu, Jitendra Joshi, Saiyami Kher, Sai Tamhankar, Udit Arora
Streaming on: Amazon Prime Video

Dubbed as “India’s first firefighter film” — Mammootty's Fireman (2015) enters the chat — Agni is ignited by the first-mover syndrome. It has a lot going for it. There’s the novelty of centering a story on the fire brigade, perhaps the only emergency services department yet to be dramatised by mainstream Hindi cinema. There’s the new visual language and mythology-coded scale of ‘fiery’ set pieces, backed by the slick production value and studio resources of Excel Entertainment. It marks National award-winning director Rahul Dholakia’s first outing since Raees (2017); it also features a solid ensemble cast led by Madgaon Express duo Pratik Gandhi and Divyenndu. And it’s set in Mumbai, with dialogue by Bambaiya specialist Vijay Maurya.

Agni revolves around Parel fire chief Vitthal Rao (Gandhi) and his close-knit team’s challenges in a city plagued by multiple blazes: restaurants, theatres, high-rises, even a student coaching center. It’s 2017, and there’s suddenly no respite for Vitthal, investigative officer Avni (Saiyami Kher) and divisional fire officer Mahadev (Jitendra Joshi), when a colleague dies (he becomes an obvious candidate the moment he smiles a lot) and it ruptures their work-fam bubble. The lack of representation of firefighting on Bollywood screens is nicely written into the plot: Vitthal’s department has a rivalry with their more recognised and celebrity-coded counterparts, the Mumbai Police. Vitthal is the honest working-class hero, barely appreciated by society and family; he shares a frosty equation with Samit (an effortless Divyenndu), his brother-in-law and a superstar cop. Samit is rich and cocky, almost as if he knows that his genre thrives on the glorification of police brutality and law enforcement. There are also the visual nods to the role of fire in everyday life — the morning routine of a superstitious officer who walks around the office with a puja thali; a wife praying for her husband’s safety at her little home temple; the lighting of a stove in a kitchen; a violent video-game. In other words, Agni is built to succeed. It has the starting aura of a Test cricket team that opts to bat first on a flat wicket.

Yet, the film inexplicably chooses the ‘accessible’ and reduced contours of the T20 game. It has everything except the right story. In shows like Mumbai Diaries, the writing does well to trust the presence of an intangible foe — the all-encompassing System which, in such cases, symbolises the fragile anatomy of the city. The citizens and unsung rescuers work despite the establishment; terrorist attacks and floods only accentuate the bureaucratic holes that already exist. Agni’s “Special Thanks” credit to the BMC (Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation) is not an issue; this is after all a production that focuses on the physicality of a teeming metropolis. But this prevents the film from being critical of things like infrastructure and disaster management — or even exploring the crisis of a place rigged against its spirited residents. It rules out themes like climate change, eco-terrorism, corporate conspiracy and institutional corruption. 9/11 changed Hollywood’s relationship with firefighter and first-responder stories, the pandemic altered the world’s gaze of medical thrillers, but a spontaneously combustible city like Mumbai needs no peg or historical event. Yet, you can sense the trepidation to blame those above the common man. At one point, Vitthal breaks into a sad monologue at the hospital: why is it always us firefighters who suffer for everyone’s lack of civic sense?

This is a sign that the film is looking for an actual villain. And this is where Agni douses its own spark. For one, the staging is incredibly corny. There is a twist, and there is an unhinged individual — a dramatic pitch no different from that of a killer in an Abbas-Mustan movie. There are shots of a pre-interval lair, a sweaty face, a tragic backstory, a mask reveal, and that notorious habit of a person acting deranged only after the revelation happens. Vitthal suspects that the fires are the crimes of an arsonist, while supercop Samit rubbishes his theory and arrests a big builder (without an inkling of political pressure) to close the case. Naturally, the screenplay goes out of its way to make Vitthal the underdog and prove his instincts correct. This means that much of the film rests on the identity and uncovering of this baddie. It’s a self-defeating path Agni chooses, so it’s best to judge the film through the lens of this choice.

In theory, this twist is socially expressive. No spoilers here, but at some level, it’s almost progressive. It frames the fire department as a metaphor for the India we inhabit today. There are clues: the name of the character, the enemy existing within, and especially the motive, which speaks to a familiar malaise of the victim complex that infects those who turn to radicalisation and bigotry. The desire to be seen — the bitter desperation to get credit — is a political emotion these days. Entire ideologies weaponise this emotion. The identity of the villain here is merely an extension of this. It’s the fictional equivalent of outsiders who resort to problematic stances and attention-seeking PR stunts after being invisibilised by a skewed system. After all, you can’t fault the logic of the modern arsonist.

But the execution of this track is poor. Forget the tacky exposition scenes of the person ‘performing’ for the camera, it’s also the fact that the film itself starts to internalise the condition. The symptoms are obvious. Under the guise of paying tribute to firefighters, Agni glorifies one category — a bit like new-age patriotism — by demonising the others. For instance, it’s implied that Samit is a crooked cop who’s made his wealth from bribes; he’s given most of the ‘comic relief’ moments. The police are reduced to more of a loud commercial enemy in Vitthal’s indie-style journey. Similarly, the firefighters are made to suffer a lot so that we keep empathising with their resentment and persecutions. Replace vocation with religion, and the connotations aren’t as harmless. 

Vitthal’s son idolises his famous uncle over his father; the kid’s forced role in the climax is another jarring note in a film that collapses under the weight of such conformist stereotypes. Agni goes into self-immolation mode with a finale that riffs on the 2012 Mantralaya fire — again a missed opportunity to lend the story real-world stakes. It fluffs so many chances to mean more than a psychopath-on-the-loose trope that it’s hard to isolate Pratik Gandhi’s skill or his chemistry with Divyenndu from the toxic carbons of the single-storied structure they’re stuck in. It’s hard to fully appreciate the visual effects and choreography of the firefighting sequences. At the end of the day, the cast and the craft can’t quite rescue Agni from succumbing to its own embers. More importantly, they can’t rescue its narrative inferno from being extinguished by my awful fire puns.