Sidharth Malhotra plays a nice young man in A Gentleman.
His character Gaurav has neatly set hair and a perfectly sweet smile. He works with an American IT company where he is frequently wins the Best Employee award.
When we first see him, he is happily posing for a picture in front of his newly acquired house in a plush Miami neighbourhood. His best friend is a funny family man, Dixit (Hussain Dalal), whose biggest worry in life is that Americans mispronounce his name as Dix/Dicks.
Gaurav is secretly in love with his best friend, Kaavya (Jacqueline Fernandez), a good-looking Indian girl who speaks Hindi with an American accent. He likes cooking and cleaning. is ready to get married, settle down, and have several children and a dog.
But Kaavya isn’t happy. She wants a man who is a little tougher and spicier than Guarav. Someone who loves adventures.
And you know what they say. Be careful about what you wish for.
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The Gentleman is directed by Raj and DK who previously helmed films like Go Goa Gone and Shor In The City in which the protagonists were neither gentle nor sweet. As expected, here too a rough daredevil young man gallops into the screen fairly soon, and takes over the plot.
The story is fun, albeit predictable. There is a general aversion for melodrama which works in the film’s favour. Close friends betray each other, people die, a romantic proposal is turned down, and all the while, the film doesn’t bat an eyelid.
On the other hand, for Raj and DK, whose last film had men fighting zombies in an island in Goa, logic and reason aren’t all that desirable.
In The Gentleman, we have an assassin, with no background in IT or engineering, quickly becoming a successful employee in a high-profile IT firm. Murders and cover-ups are a cake-walk, and at least two buildings blow up with men walking away as if nothing happened.
Suniel Shetty plays Colonel, a man who has been controlling a team of trained warriors who operate a clandestine mission that will compromise national security. India’s National Security Agency and other international agencies are hot on his heels, yet we keep seeing him in cities like Bangkok, Mumbai, and Miami.
What keeps the film going is the non-linear narrative that the makers have executed reasonably well. The pace is swift, and there’s little time to ponder over the rationality of what we just watched.
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Siddharth Malhotra as the meek and sweet Gaurav repeats his Hasee To Phasee act, but with some remarkable improvements. He plays Rishi, a trained fighter and assassin, with equal earnestness. Yet, he isn’t all that convincing.
In fact, Rishi is reminiscent of characters from many other Asian action comedies. He is not easily scared. In an early scene, he is perilously tossed on the road from a moving bike after his vehicle rams into a car. Bleeding profusely, he sits down on the road and tries to smoke a cigarette.
Siddharth just doesn’t look like a guy who can pull off that coolness. He isn’t funny. At least not at this stage of his acting career.
Kaavya might seem like a bimbo, but the film has more planned for her. Her daily routine includes getting arrested by cops for speeding. She works as Rishi’s buddy when villains come firing bullets.
When Rishi asks her if she can use a gun, she replies, “It’s America babe!” Trump would be proud.
Kaavya isn’t Terminator‘s Linda Hamilton. She isn’t an independent and strong woman worth rooting for. She is kind of women Bollywood action-comedy potboilers love. She can do a strip-tease and pole-dance, and she can kick ass. Jacqueline has a flawless body that she proudly flaunts. Her acting prowess is almost non-existent, but she makes it up with giggles, pouts and a certain voice-modulation and accent that is popularly perceived as cute.
***
Recommended
The Gentleman is more rooted and a more sincere attempt than films like Race or Welcome. Yet, it doesn’t try to transcend Indian action-comedy’s candyfloss genre. There are amusing jokes, a couple of humorous sequences, and some neatly choreographed action sequences.
But nothing makes an impression.
It’s like getting caught in a routine traffic jam in a city. When the signal turns green, there’s no lingering memory of the faces and vehicles in the chaos.
*****
The Gentleman review is a Silverscreen original article. It was not paid for or commissioned by anyone associated with the movie. Silverscreen.in and its writers do not have any commercial relationship with movies that are reviewed on the site.