When we meet for the first time after the opening act, Aditya Roy Kapur has lost his memory (pronounced ‘mammary’ by one of the salient actors throughout the film), which is a blessing since he has forgotten Anil Kapoor’s hamming in the last week’s film.
Roy Kapoor looks lean mean wiry and super-athletic, like Sanjay Dutt on a Keto diet, can’t remember whether he is Rishi or Om. Double role? No no. Fortunately not. The government agent is just stressed with all the shooting, some of it right in his chest and brain.
No wonder Rishi/Om has lost his mind. “He will remember me the minute he sees me,” says Rishi/Om’s mother, played with long-suffering sighs by poor Prachi Desai and prepares his favourite kesar kheer which her beloved beta loved before amnesia struck. Roy Kapoor gorges on the kheer clearly worried about what it would do to his Keto diet.
Diet be damned. There is so much to chew on in Rashtra Kavach Om. Director Kapil Verma keeps the proceedings on a fox trot. Some of the action sequences are staged with arresting elan. And Roy Kapoor is clearly up to the task. Some of the supporting cast, the standby soldiers to save the nation from the baddies(how about a mission to save audiences from bad films?) are in the mood to entertain. Vicky Arora keeps exclaiming, ‘What the luck/duck/truck’ …everything but the ‘F’ word. Then there is the token Muslim soldier ready to die for the country.
This is clearly a film meant for family audiences, and never mind the heavy doses of action staged with much verve and a background score that knows about punctuation marks.
The cinematographer Vineet Malhotra gives a striking visual look to the film especially towards the climax when the restless cast moves to Armenia for the final bang-bang amidst a whole lot of ‘shocking’ revelations which includes a tilt of the cap to patricide and a plea for keeping our country safe from foreign hands.
By the time Elnaaz Nourozi dropped in for an item song, I was already wondering when the sequel to this action adventure will show up.
Rating: *** ½ (3.5/5)
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