Scale is everything in . The Hindi-language action film has eight stars, six screenwriters and three additional scribes who worked on dialogue, including director Rohit Shetty. The hardware on display is similarly expansive — there are battleships, helicopters, dozens of cars that get blown up and smashed.
And weapons both large and small — missiles, guns, machetes. At one point, Tiger Shroff brandishes the Urumi, an Indian sword with a whip-like blade which originated in modern-day Kerala. There is so much to fit in every frame that wide shots are the default mode, with Ravi Basrur’s score filling and underlining every beat.
The ambition seems to be sensory overload. Then there’s the story. Shetty’s Cop Universe, of which is the fifth installment, is built on the idea of the police officer as superhero.
His men — Singham (Ajay Devgn), Simmba (Ranveer Singh) and Sooryavanshi (Akshay Kumar) — are upright sons of the soil. (An additional female officer, Deepika Padukone’s Shakti Shetty, makes her entry in this film.) All of these characters are unblemished; while Simmba started as corrupt, he is now an honest officer and sworn ally of Singham.
These are steely, courageous law enforcement authorities who operate as their own judiciary. Encounter killings in these movies are not just routine, but celebrated. In , the cops are bestowed celestial status — the seeds for which were sown in 2011 with the first , when Singham emerged from the temple tank as a deity.
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