Sanjay Dutt—God bless his imposing personality—plays the dignified comic relief in Chandraprakash Dwivedi’s well-meaning historical misfire which is in desperate need of a dignified dimension.
The counter-enervated epic starts with a blinded Prithviraj, played by a clueless Akshay Kumar, fighting lions in gladiator-style stadium, as hundreds of spectators cheer and encourage the lions to make a meal out of Prithviraj.
I could understand the crowds’ enthusiasm: watching a blind Indian ruler grappling with hungry lions is their equivalent of the Bigg Boss finale.
It is a decisive moment in Indian history, as well as its rather tame and emasculated interpretation in this film. Dr Chandraprakash Dwivedi means well. He wants his binary-narration to move in two different directions. But the battle-ground valour doesn’t work, largely because Akshay Kumar looks like he has never gotten on top of a horse in his life. I am sure that is not entirely the case: while holidaying with his family he must have had many opportunities to trot till he dropped.
But this one is not about touristic trotting. Right from the moustache to other trappings of Rajputana pride and valour, Akshay strikes a false note right across the narrative's hectic but vacuous horizon. He seems to be enjoying the thought of playing this attractive figure in Indian history. But like a child who doesn't know how to operate a coveted toy, Akshay is completely at a loss as to how to make Prithviraj a credible comprehensive and rounded character.
Akshay, a fine actor in some films especially Hera Pheri and Airlift, seems to forget that he is not in this for the ride. That he is supposed to be playing a Hindu ruler who was a fair and just warrior who gave his enemy so much slack that he (the enemy) just felt lucky, and Prithviraj was a feminist long before Mary Wollstonecraft. So when he marries the adamant Sanyukta (who fell in love with Prithviraj without seeing him) and suggests that she join him in his durbar as an equal, Akshay makes it sound like he is inviting his screen wife to smoke pot with him.
The actor, for all his earnestness (don’t miss the real pearl necklace and the designer jewellery) just doesn’t get the point. As played by Akshay Kumar, Prithviraj Chauhan is a warrior and a feminist and also a bit of a wimp, like Shahid Kapoor’s Ratan Singh, that upright somewhat prissy ruler in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Padmaavat who insisted on sleeping with the enemy (in a manner of speaking) although he gets repeatedly backstabbed.
There is a thin line between righteousness and sheer stupidity. In the brutal betrayal of Muhammad Ghori (Manav Vij) effective but surprisingly subdued) lies the key to this quaint lifeless pseudo-historical costume drama where everyone talks about valour but little of it is evident in the poor, nay impoverished, war scenes where the arrows fly faster than bullets causing grievous injury to nothing except the film’s epic design which remains unfulfilled and half-finished like an embroidered cloth that was abandoned halfway.
While Akshay is distressfully miscast, Manushi Chhillar’s raw inexperience shows in every frame. Even in the Holi song dance, her choli fits her like a glove; her nazaakat (airs &grace) barely registers beyond the surface level. She does have her moments, though. The jauhar (self-immolation) sequence in the climax is accompanied by Sunidhi Chauhan’s robust singing which is more valorous than anything you will see or hear in this aborted epic excursion.
Chants of Har Har Mahadev rent the soundtrack, reminding us that Hindu governance ended abruptly with Prithviraj, that in fact, he was the first harbinger of Hindutva and also the founding father of feminism in Hindustan. It’s a huge responsibility to shoulder and one that the on-screen Prithviraj is sadly not up to. Akshay Kumar doesn’t know where to begin.
Samrat Prithviraj has zero chemistry between the onscreen Prithviraj and Samyukta. They sing and dance and at one point in the excitable plot, he tells her that all poetry fails in describing her words. But it’s all words words words, empty words which bereft of a creative concept seem self-mocking rather than epic.
Is Samrat Prithviraj a disappointment? Yes! Is it a washout? No. But it misses the epic vision and the designer lyricism of a Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s period dramas by a wide margin. This is neither a full-fledged costume drama nor a bio-pic on a Hindu king who ran off with his wife from her swayamvar, thereby making her the first runaway bride of civilization, long before Julia Roberts got there.
Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based film critic who has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. He tweets at @SubhashK_Jha.
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source https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/akshay-kumar-is-distressfully-inadequate-as-samrat-prithviraj-10757381.html
