'Baaghi 4' Movie Review: Tiger's 'Animal' Takes A Catnap

Baaghi 4 opens with a shot of a truck hurtling into a man driving his car at full speed. The next shot shows him wounded, bloody and suspended upside down in the totaled vehicle on a railway track, with a train heading straight for him. It’s fitting that these are POV (point-of-view) shots where the camera places us in the position of the hero — because watching the rest of this film feels like being hit by a truck and a train, again and again and again. The fourth installment of the Baaghi film franchise suggests that there were three before this one. They were all Hindi remakes of Tamil and Telugu action thrillers, and Baaghi 4 continues the tradition by being heavily inspired from Sasi’s Ainthu Ainthu Ainthu (2013).

But it doesn’t matter. Instead, just imagine Devdas as a muscular Animal fanboy, except nobody is sure whether his Paro is real or not. Blood flows rather than booze. Chandramukhi is a Punjabi call girl (Sonam Bajwa) pretending to be a Spanish escort named Olivia. The fictional city of Chandara is composed of St. Xavier’s College Mumbai corridors and bad CGI skies, and there’s a psychotic villain (Sanjay Dutt) who’s a hybrid of Shah Rukh Khan in Darr and Bobby Deol in Animal. And of course, there’s Saurabh Sachdeva as the baddie’s eccentric brother, hamming it up in reaction shots like the action-film equivalent of Rocky’s bestie’s physical subtitling in Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani.

Ronny is back to being Ranveer Pratap Singh after a brief detour as Ranveer Chaturvedi (for patriotic reasons) in Baaghi 3. “Hallucination” is the condition a wise doctor diagnoses him after he comes out of an accident-induced coma (remember the truck?). He pines for a dead girlfriend named Alisha D’Souza (Harnaaz Sandhu), only to be told that he’s imagining things. She apparently never existed; there is no sign of her identity except his super-silky memories, and all evidence points to Ronny’s delulu being the only solulu. The inspirations for this franchise are chosen to honour the mood of the moment. Just as the second and third movies rode the wave of nationalism, the fourth opts to glide along the tides of hypermasculinity. Ronny smokes and grieves and yells and hulk-smashes everyone in sight, trying to prove that he’s not crazy and the world is gaslighting him, just as the film gaslights us into believing it is real. Shroff commits very hard to a film that’s too busy committing to him, as a result of which there is a confusion in commitment, and only the viewer is left with commitment issues.

Tiger Shroff

 But the apple cannot fall far from the tree. If you think about it, there’s a ‘nation’ in hallucination. So Ronny’s past as a uniform-wearing “defense sea-force officer” surfaces. He remembers Alisha falling for him when he lectures her about social responsibility over social media after mistakenly breaking her phone. He falls for her when he realises she’s a doctor who needed her phone for emergencies and not “Gen Z reasons”. She also lives in a foster home for sweet-orphan vibes. The twist is obviously that Ronny may have been right all along; others die relentlessly — his brother (so much for the plot of Baaghi 3), his Chandramukhi — to sustain this twist. The film continues to put the nation in hallucination by introducing an unhinged catholic villain (he was Muslim in Animal) who spends most of his time scolding a Jesus Christ statue in church. Ronny Singh (Ghulam fans will not be pleased) tolerates none of this in the second half, slaughtering armies of randomly masked assailants in the most derivative action pieces possible.

 The film enters pulpy Action Jackson and Bullet Train territory during the backstory of Chacko — yes, that’s his name — featuring an age-gap romance, a beach shootout and an ultra-stylised tragedy. But the icing on the vegan cake is a church full of gangsters wearing perfectly tailored mafia suits and hats: the unofficial dress-code for their boss’ wedding. When Ronny gatecrashes, it’s like he’s jumped into the ‘Smooth Criminal’ video, except nobody’s doing the moonwalk. There’s also a scene where a shackled woman wakes up in a creepy castle full of her hand-crafted portraits — and a tiger (not the actor) circling her to boot. I’ve seen soft toys with more swag than this unfortunately rendered and glitchy pussycat. It’s normal to wonder if it’s real or a pixellated figment of Chacko’s cigar-chomping imagination.

In between, there are carefully worded songs called “Laila faila (Laila, spread)” and “tune rona sikha diya (you taught me how to cry),” and a disheveled Tiger (the actor) kissing a henchman’s forehead in relief when the guy confirms that Ronny is not hallucinating anymore. He twists the chap’s neck and bald head absent-mindedly, making for the kind of so-bad-it’s-great moment that this film deserved more of. I get Ronny’s self-doubt, though. Imagine being told that you’re cuckoo for longing for something that does not exist. In an alternate universe, he’s a film critic whose sanity is questioned for believing that he had once watched a solid Bollywood action thriller. The 4 in Baaghi 4 was the star rating he claims to have given.