‘Jaat’ Movie Review: When the Sunny Deol Actioner Goes South

Director: Gopichand Malineni
Writer: Gopichand Malineni, Srinivas Gavireddy, Sai Madhav Burra, Saurabh Gupta
Cast: Sunny Deol, Randeep Hooda, Regina Cassandra, Vineet Kumar Singh, Saiyami Kher, Ramya Krishnan, Jagapathi Babu
Language: Hindi

During his second of many uncomplicated rampages in Jaat, Sunny Deol delivers a line that’s his version of Shah Rukh Khan saying, “Before touching the son, deal with the father” in Jawan (2023) or Salman Khan saying, “Politics is not my field, but don’t force me to enter it” in Sikandar (too recent). Deol’s self-referential roar goes: “The North knows this ‘dhaai kilo ka haath,’ now let the South experience it”. It’s a fun idea, if you think about it (but not too much). Deol’s the definitive North Indian hero, a man’s man’s man’s man steeped in Sehwagian clarity: see enemy, hit enemy. Following in the steps of his contemporaries, Jaat is his pan-Indian intro-shot: a hit Telugu director, a coastal Andhra setting, villains from Sri Lanka (not Pakistan), a Jai Shri Ram-song entry on an Ayodhya-bound train, a hulk-smash setup, a mixed cast and crew.

A nameless Jaat traveler stops at an Andhra village terrorised by a fearsome criminal named Ranatunga (Randeep Hooda). This stranger’s motives are North-coded and primal: he was eating his idlis, local goons pushed him and ruined his meal, so all he seeks is an apology. “Sorry bol (say sorry),” he demands — while bulldozing his way to the top of this non-sorry gangster chain. His violence is simple and direct: a Haryanvi wrecking ball in a land of sickle-wielding and sexist bloodshed. His fists are radioactive. He even does a neat cigarette trick to blend in. It’s like watching a Sunny Deol action hero on a cultural exchange program. Mass-movie styles and traditions are swapped, mediocrity is traded. His intent is so primitive that it’s almost entertaining. He’s just a hangry madman denied some hot food. In the Bollywood genre multiverse, he’s the short-tempered protagonist of a cross-cultural romcom like 2 States. Brutality is his love language.

But minutes before the interval, Jaat remembers that it’s 2025. No mega-scale Hindi actioner is allowed to exist in isolation. So the cultural exchange program mutates into a social supremacy and Hindi imposition program. Mr. Jaat decides that an apology is not enough. His brain wakes up. He suddenly notices the atrocities around him as if he’s Sherlock Holmes profiling a place: weapons, money, a hidden cop car, women’s police uniforms strewn across Ranatunga’s bungalow. Something is amiss. He must rescue someone, anyone, everyone. His transformation from random idli-craving trekker to male saviour and national saviour begins. He starts with the female officers held hostage in Ranatunga’s mansion. The film’s true identity slowly emerges — a trojan horse for the same old themes of jingoism and moral posturing.  

The entire second half is spent raising the stakes until there are no more stakes left to raise. Clumsy context replaces clunky context. Throw a stone and you’ll hit a backstory. First, Ranatunga and his gang (the omnipresent Vineet Kumar Singh plays his brother) are revealed to be former Jaffna coolies who steal gold and start their gangster empire in India; then they’re revealed to be former militants who were too dangerous even for the Tigers; then they’re revealed to be state-sponsored terrorists who’ve been hired to spread chaos and claim the coastal land that holds a priceless alternative to uranium in its soil. This involves a secret Swiss meeting where a corrupt Indian politician asks “but why have you called me here?” before his foreign counterpart agrees to get to the point. 

The baddies aren’t the only ones blessed with an inception of identities. When our hero is asked multiple times why he’s so hell-bent on helping the villagers, he only calls himself a do-gooder, ‘kisan’ (farmer) and patriot. Once he’s done being vague, protecting the hapless women and declaring that they’re all his sisters — commentary that’s designed to appease fifth graders in a juvenile detention center — someone recognises him as a superhuman prisoner from the past, and someone else recognises him as a literal one-man-army. Basically, a kisan and a jawan (soldier). His name is revealed; his purpose is revealed; revelations are revealed. Just like that, he’s no longer a hangry chap following the philosophy of a cinematic ancestor who once growled “No if, no but, only Jatt!”. If the film went on any longer, another flashback might have shown baby Jaat floating away from a saffron-tinged Planet Krypton.

The film-making is all too performative. Suffering is amplified to deafening levels so that the payoff hits harder. Women aren’t just dismissed or beaten, they’re stripped naked and humiliated in public. Vulgar cops and goons don’t just attack; they taunt, cackle and abuse. Innocent people aren’t just killed, they’re beheaded and burnt alive. We need to talk about the film’s fetish for severed heads, but I’ll save that gory chat for another day. A child doesn’t just write a letter requesting help from the president; the letter comes in a package stained with blood and severed fingers. Ranatunga doesn’t just grab land; he intimidates Christians in church by imitating the Christ crucifix pose and decapitates Muslim protestors in sugarcane fields. He’s secular like that. You expect him to use one of the heads to make a scarecrow, but the violence isn’t imaginative enough. At some point, the words “say sorry” echoed in my head and I started apologising to the screen just to end the needless carnage.  

After the Sunny-goes-South gimmick wears off, the action gets dull because the hero is so invincible. Even when he’s injured and unconscious, he looks like he’s getting his beauty sleep. For him, danger is merely a word with ‘anger’ in it. The fauji and desh-ki-mitti (son of soil) monologues sound like mechanical inputs from a hit-making algorithm. It says something that the movie is far more watchable when the hero didn’t know he was a hero. Once the long-drawn systemic rot sets in, Jaat distinguishes itself as a film better than Sikandar in an age where the bar is lower than the corpses buried in Ranatunga’s fields. My favourite track features a slick CBI officer named Satya Murthy (Jagapathi Babu), who leaves from New Delhi to dispense justice in the first scene and spends the rest of the film in a private plane and car on the way to the village. It’s like he’s switching time-zones. In other words, he keeps arriving. And he reaches just in time to applaud Sunny Deol setting the stage for Jaat 2. Worse, he doesn’t even say sorry.