Nice picture it show female empowerment.but In his latest foray into India’s dusty political badlands, director Prakash Jha parades an entire array of reprehensible goons out for their pound of flesh.
But the tough-cop heroine of Jai Gangaajal is up against more than just individual law-breakers.
Her ire has a larger context: it is directed at an entire system that is completely at the mercy of the high and mighty.
Jai Gangaajal has only tenuous links with the 2003 cop drama that it is meant to be a sequel to. Neither its characters nor its plot borrow anything at all from Gangaajal.
It does touch upon the question of mob violence and instant justice, but there are hangings instead of blindings here.
It also, in the process, addresses a whole lot of other issues: land rights, farmer suicides, ugly politics and police corruption.
For good measure, the plot has a PhD degree holder(Rahul Bhat in a special appearance) who has chucked up a high paying job in the US to throw his lot behind the poor landowners whose future is under grave threat from big industry.
Despite the topical themes it tackles and all the supercharged action that unfolds on the screen, Jai Gangaajal never really kicks into top gear.
There is little in the film’s good-cops-bad-cops construct that has not been seen before in Hindi cinema, especially in Jha’s own previous films.
Jai Gangaajal is a trite, if not entirely unexciting, drama in which the police force is always on the back foot and the land mafia and their political masters call the shots.
The tables turn just a touch when superintendent of police Abha Mathur takes charge of Bankipur district, the first female officer to do so.
The district is in the vice-like grip of a ruthless politician Babloo Pandey(Manav Kaul), who, with the help of a rogue cop Bhola Nath Singh(Prakash Jha) and a younger brother Dabloo Pandey(Ninad Kamat), rides roughshod over the local people.
Dabloo has his eyes set on the small plots of land owned by the town’s poor inhabitants because he is in cahoots with an industrialist who plans to build a mega thermal power station in the area.
The no-nonsense SP puts her foot down. In the bloody confrontations that ensue, the body count is understandably high and many an innocent has to pay with his or her life.
Writer-director Prakash Jha, who also plays a meaty on-screen role, has nearly as much footage as the lead actress.
Bhola Nath Singh is a hopelessly compromised cop on the payroll of the four-time MLA of Bankipur.
SP Abha Mathur does everything in her power to rein him in, but he is a loose cannon whose recklessness repeatedly gets the better of him until one folly too many triggers a change of heart.
The moral and emotional conflicts that Jai Gangaajal is built around are rarely convincing. Worse, the solutions it offers are unacceptably pat.
The MLA-hoodlum who believes that women in uniform lose control of themselves meets his match in Abha Mathur but not before he is pushed to a corner by a mob baying for his blood.
but the lead role in the movie is SP abha mathur.