Movie Review: 2.0 is an ambitious but staggeringly silly film

By Shreehari H

Grey is a shade that’s mostly foreign to the pastels Shankar paints his films with. In his latest, 2.0 – an overblown, overhyped affair if ever there was one – every character is a stock caricature, speaking strictly in Hallmark homilies. “WikiLeaks mein agla leak tum hoga,” a businessman threatens a minister, while a college-going teenager pontificates on the all-pervasive relevance of smartphones in our lives. “WhatsApp aur selfies ke bina life ka koi matlab nahi hai,” she reminds us. True to form, even the civil services aren’t spared: an IAS officer chairing an emergency meeting asks, “What is this? Kya phenomenon hai?” (how a man like that would clear both his prelims and his mains exams is a question for another day). As befits an all-spectacle, zero-nuance enterprise like this, everything has been doubled here, from scale to special effects to sermons to stupidity. Chitti aaya hai, aaya hai, as Pankaj Udhas might say, and we’re all the worse for it.

Akshay Kumar plays an ex-ornithologist-turned-villain — an Angry Bird named what else but Pakshi Rajan. His is a life that begins and ends with the chirping of a bird, and his backstory makes for the most compelling segment of this film (“Kya Nandu? hospital ke saamne khade hoke phu-phu kar rahe hai?” comes a close second). “Iske paas map ya radar nahi hai,” Pakshi says about the astonishing self-navigational capabilities of the Arctic tern, and when his audience gets lulled into a slumber during this stupefyingly silly seminar, so do we.

In one of the finest casting decisions of the year, Amy Jackson plays a robot. “She’s a nice, intelligent, lovely assistant,” her creator tells a bunch of curious onlookers, with “pre-programmed, customisable, controllable feelings” (and barely expressed, I would add, given that this is the lead actress of Ek Deewana Tha we’re talking about). This humanoid also happens to have a conscience. “Boss, agar maine hacking ki, toh rules todoongi,” she remarks worriedly at one point.

It’s grimly befitting that she speaks of silicon and polycarbonate dust, endowed as she is with the acting range of a microprocessor chip.

Which brings us to the man behind the dark glasses himself. Like Enthiran, this film is clearly an out-and-out star vehicle meant to showcase an ageing behemoth at the peak of his powers. Rajnikanth remains as charismatic as ever, even when uttering the kind of lines that wouldn’t pass muster in a backyard production (understandable though, coming from a man who made Kilimanjaro rhyme with Mohenjo Daro). “Tum toh science jaante ho?” he asks an adversary, before going on to invoke one elementary particle after another — protons, electrons, etc. “Death ke baad ka aura hai microphoton minus,” we are told, and in the end, it all comes down to shakti in a Goliath-versus-Goliath matchup. “A giant ball of negative energy with a mind, a very angry mind. Shaayad yahi fifth force hai,” he explains in a matter-of-fact tone, and I can only imagine how James Chadwick, Ernest Rutherford, and Niels Bohr must collectively be writhing in their graves right about now.

Shankar’s film attempts to throw together a hundred themes at once: from the greediness of multinational corporations to the duplicity of bureaucracy to the debilitating effects of technological advancement, though he never really breaks new ground with any of these. The director has clearly striven to make an epochal, visually spectacular event — any Shankar film, by definition, has always been an event — and the effort is always visible (and almost admirable, but to a significantly lesser extent: case in point being an ear-splitting background score that aspires to Rohit-Shetty levels of cacophony). Speaking of unsubtlety, the RMS Titanic might serve as a most apt metaphor here: there’s no point in coasting along at twenty-six miles per hour in an iceberg-strewn vicinity, and more so if only four of your compartments are watertight in the first place. Then again, Shankar is no James Cameron — heck, he’s not even a Ken Hughes, for that matter. Chitti Chitti Blah Blah.

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

Shreehari H. is a lover of films and an even greater lover of writing.