By Subhash K. Jha
Mumbai: There are a lot of flying objects in the trailer of "Simmba"... Fists, fireworks, rhetorics and of course cars...you name it. This is the larger-than-life world of Rohit Shetty. Something or the other has to be 'golmaal', boss.
Sure enough, Ranveer Singh plays a corrupt cop who believes making money from the law is his birthright. After several hurriedly-cut escapades showing Ranveer's Simmba in positions of financial compromise, the trailer swerves broadly into a conscientious trip with Simmba taking on rapists while an innocent-looking girl tells him, "Bhaiyya, rapists must die".
On comes an assistant cop with serious blood pressure issues, muttering "Until the rapists die, nothing will change".
Well, yes. But is it that simple? Bad cop turns good cop, takes on the baddies... crime is eradicated. In this Operation Clean-up, Ranveer is joined at the end of the trailer by ‘Singham' Ajay Devgn. Didn't I tell you, the trailer began with a voiceover about this ill-tempered little boy who grows up wanting to be a cop?
So, now we have Singham and Simmba hand-in-hand. By the time the breakneck (and break bones) trailer groaned to a halt, we knew the entire story of "Simmba", and why Rohit Shetty has joined hands with Karan Johar to tell us about one more badass cop who will come around to make this world a better place.
1976's angry young cop Vijay (Amitabh Bachchan) in "Zanjeer" is now the smirking Simmba. So smug in his corrupt cocoon, that he seems like an anomaly.
We can never get enough of Vijay/Singham/Simmba. Because we are still fighting the same forces of corruption that bothered writers Salim-Javed in the 1970s. And yes, the heroine continues to be marginalised in these macho tales of heroic forbearance.
If Jaya Bhaduri was a minuscule presence in "Zanjeer", Sara Ali Khan, so pivotal in "Kedarnath", is here reduced to a prop mouthing inane lines like, "The next time you need to do someone's ‘encounter', I can give you tips."
That's all we need. An encounter specialist who looks like she just walked out of the beauty parlour.
The trailer of "Simmba" doesn't hold back. It tells us the entire story, introduces us to all the twists and turns in the plot and gives enough ‘feud' for thought to make us grateful that ‘Singham' Ajay Devgn is around to ensure his new spinoff doesn't spin out of control.