Jigra (2024) Movie Review: Alia Bhatt & Vasan Bala team up to reincarnate the angry-young-(wo)-man in a dull prison-break movie

In 2022, upon the release of “Gangubai Kathiawadi,” Anurag Kashyap a close friend and collaborator of director Vasan Bala noted that Alia Bhatt is the new Bacchan. Bala, who we all know is fascinated by pop culture and how it shapes the narrative of the present, past, and future of cinema itself, must have taken the comment quite literally. With “Jigra,” his third directorial venture (fourth if you consider the unreleased “Peddlers“) Bala has a bigger budget and even greater star power in his kitty.

The usually dependable Alia Bhatt stars as Satya, an orphan who had made herself into such a rock-solid young woman that her meditative gaze can get any shit done. Early on in her life, she witnessed the tragic suicide of her father when she and her younger sibling Ankur (later played by Vedang Raina) returned from school one day. It’s obvious that ever since that day, one of her life’s ultimate aims has been to shield her brother from harm’s way. So, when Ankur grows up in the sheltered presence of his sister and eventually comes in harm’s way on his first business trip to Hansi Dao, we know that Bala would make the fuck up life-threatening.

In that context, he devises a fictional country just so he can bring the kid into a fatal, life-threatening situation where he is given a death sentence by electrocution. With no one else there to help him, Satya decides to fly down to Hansi Dao and figure out how to get her brother out of the prison, which, in the literal sense is a hellish space run by Hansaraj Landa (Vivek Gomber). With legal ways not working in a country whose ideals and agenda don’t match a straightforward moral compass known to humankind, Satya starts to get more and more agitated, anxious, and angry. That is until she meets Bhatia (Manoj Pahwa), an ex-gangster who has also been trying to get his son out of the facility but to no avail. Intermix an ex-jail-officer Muthu (Rahul Ravindran) and the trio form a formidable alley in each other, testing every way possible to get their ‘kids’ out.

Now, all of this and some unnecessary clutter from the first two acts of the film and I am sure you will know what the third act will entail. There’s a chaotic energy that the third act carries but even in the chaos, “Jigra” somehow manages to be incredibly dull. For a film that can be simply sold as a prison break narrative, all the planning, strategizing, failing and reworking is incredibly tedious; to the extent where you wonder what’s Bala trying to do here other than throwing a dozen juvenile easter eggs our way. The pacing is lackluster, the characters only work on paper, and the twists and turns are not rigged in any kind of suspense or tension that will make you want to be constantly engaged in it.

What’s left is Alia Bhatt’s performance which is also intermediately stunning and hammy. In some of the more vulnerable moments when she breaks down the shield that Satya carries with her, Bhatt elevates the character to greater highs. However, whenever she is trying to rework Bachchan’s angry young man avatar, her character work feels forced and inept. The only other positive I can find in the movie is probably the costume design. Veera Kapur Ee dresses Alia in unusually baggy shirts and suits; allowing her character to feel more authentic and grounded within the film’s world. Everyone else including the usually dependable Manoj Pahwa and Vivek Gomber are just downright caricature versions of more heightened characters that we have seen in other movies; more specifically the films of Quentin Tarantino (a filmmaker Bala constantly references in his movie).

The prison-break section of the film also feels stretched out, listless, and wearisome. Bala has insights into what makes and breaks a traditional masala caper and while he is trying to refigure his way through the genre, the constant clash between the new and old (a trope that we have seen him do a self-referential trade on in his previous movies “Monica, O My Darling” and “Mard Ko Dard Nahi Hota,”) doesn’t come together well. Much like all his previous films, this one also possesses a deflated energy that simply presents his movies as a better version of what could have been but never truly attuning to greatness in any way due to his infantile obsessions.

A filmmaker like Vasa Bala deserves this kind of budget to make a movie that he has in his head. It’s just that his fascination with throwing all his ideas on the wall to see what sticks is getting out of hand. So, if he continues to do much of the same, his movies will be hitting roadblocks again and again and that’s not a place a filmmaker wants to be in.