Kesari 2 Movie Review: Akshay Kumar acts in a film full of patriotism and passion

Kesari 2 Movie Review: Akshay Kumar acts in a film full of patriotism and passion

Kesari 2 movie cast:

• Akshay Kumar,
• Simon Paiseley Day,
• R Madhavan,
• Ananya Panday,
• Regina Cassandra,
• Amit Sial,
• Alexx O’Nell,
• Steven Hartley,
• Krish Rao

Kesari 2 movie director: Karan Singh Tyagi
Kesari 2 movie rating: 2.5 stars

Kesari Chapter 2 Movie Review :

Akshay Kumar plays C Sankaran Nair like an extension of his other roles. He and R Madhavan go head to head with thundering dialogues filling up the court-room drama and high-on-populism lines.

Kesari Chapter 2 Movie Review & Rating: More than a hundred years after it occurred, the April 1919 massacre of Jallianwala Bagh is a wound that continues to fester. There has been no contestation about what happened that terrible day when General Reginald Dyer ordered his troops to fire upon scores of unarmed innocents, many of them women and children, without a single warning.

The people of Amritsar who had gathered there to protest against the Rowlatt Act had no inkling that a spotter plane had been deployed to ascertain their numbers: shortly afterwards it flew overhead, shoot-to-kill orders were barked, and ground was filled with the bodies of the dead and dying.

‘Kesari 2’, the second instalment of the franchise after the 2019 ‘Kesari’, has no thematic ties with the earlier film: the similarity lies in it putting the spotlight, yet again, on a fightback against the British empire, leading to a surge of patriotic pride.

It was a time when the freedom struggle was gaining ground, and Dyer’s black deed had placed the Crown on the backfoot. In gallops the ‘best Indian barrister’, the recently-knighted Sir C Sankaran Nair (Akshay Kumar) to the rescue, all primed to defend Dyer. Confronted by mounting evidence to the contrary, and a conscience-attack, the man who knows as much about ‘kalaripayattu as kanoon’ has a change of heart, and from then on, it’s all guns blazing against the perpetrator of the massacre, and the might of the Empire.

‘Kesari 2’, based on the book ‘The Case That Shook The Empire’ by Raghu Palat and Pushpa Palat, is a handsomely-mounted prestige picture that goes along its expected beats, without any surprises. It may be pertinent to ask if the filmmakers couldn’t get a Keralite to play ‘a man from Keral’, given there are so many brilliant actors working in Malayalam cinema, but given that this is fashioned as an Akshay Kumar vehicle, it’s a pointless question.

They did get Regina Cassandra, fresh off her ‘Jaat’ outing, to play Nair’s loyal wife, and she does leave a mark in a small role. The other female character, that of local female lawyer Dilreet Gill is played by Ananya Panday who tries hard to be credible, but there’s only so much she can do with her dialoguing and body language, which remains stubbornly contemporary.

The actors playing the British characters all have their stiff upper lip in place, with Simon Paisley Day enthusiastically grimacing and scowling through the film, making no attempt to hide his visceral hatred of the ‘Indian slaves’ he rides roughshod over.

But none of them are given as much play as Akshay, who plays Nair like an extension of his other recent roles. The sole exception is R Madhavan as the half-Indian, half-British Neville McKiney, who has a reputation of being Nair’s formidable foe. Both Akshay and Madhavan go head to head with thundering dialogues filling up the court-room drama in the second half. We also get high-on-populism lines with Akshay’s Nair liberally throwing the F word around, in the context of the British overlords. Xxxx off, he yells, and the audience in my first day first show cheered: the mind boggles at the use this kind of unparliamentary language, which would never have been allowed in a court-room, and especially not in that era. Is this the ‘creative liberty’, that filmmakers lay claim to?

While the film is clearly aligned with the Make India Great Again thinking, you can spot a couple of smartly subversive ideas nestling in there. A line about a joint ‘Hindu-Muslim’ celebration around Ram Navami which happened for the ‘first time ‘ just before the massacre (apparently the dangerous thing that incensed the divide-and-rule British masters so much that it put the pre-planned executions at Jallianwala Bagh into motion, according to the film) tells us such a thing actually happened, something that seems like a receding hope these days. And both the British and Indian lawyers blow the bugle for ‘freedom of speech’: now where have we heard that phrase before? And can it gain currency again?

Net net, Kesari 2, by Dharma Productions and Adar Poonawala, is a film of its time, for its time, unpacking a tragic chapter of our past with dollops of explanatory, patriotic fervour, whose opening disclaimer states that ‘though inspired by true events, it is a work of pure fiction’.