Fateh is dismal attempt at stylized filmmaking

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Woe and betide! This is the first Hindi release of the year, and it’s a pathetic cinematic exercise on all counts. Fateh means ‘victory’ but the film not only ‘defeats’ the audience sensibilities but also its aim of exposing cybercrime, a current social evil of no ordinary magnitude.

It is perhaps high time that actor and first-time writer-director Sonu Sood decides where he wants to go. Yes, we know he can play the good guy and the baddie, but he must know that only content works in cinema, specially in an era of high admission rates where the last thing viewers would like is to shell out hard-earned money and also waste valuable time is endless and brutal gore in the name of a social comment!

And what’s this social comment? Well, ex-special ops officer Fateh Singh (Sonu Sood) is settled peacefully in his Punjab pind (village), Moga, when his crony Nimrit (Shiv Jyoti Rajput) goes missing. Seems that she has been an unwilling accomplice in a huge cyber fraud that has led to several of her villagers losing hard-earned money (that cinematic frauds like these makes viewers lose small but significant amounts as ticket moneys is just a thought!) and one man losing his life (by suicide). Ergo, she leaves in search of the perpetrators.

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Fateh moves to Delhi and gets help from ethical hacker Khushi (Jacqueline Fernandez) and gradually goes to the roots of the racket, which even has international ramifications (of course) and is headed by one Reza (a somnambulant Naseeruddin Shah), a vicious Satyaprakash (Vijay Raaz), whose digital password is “Satyameva Jayate” (that is supposed to show irony), and at a lower level, there is this pimp-like man (Akashdeep Sabir), who is Fateh’s first target.

And Sonu Sood, also story and (with Ankur Pajni) scriptwriter makes the gore an outright (believe it or nuts!) bore. He not only goes on an unceasing spree of Anurag Kashyap-Vishal Bhardwaj brand of “disturbing” (the credit titles’ description, not mine!) mayhem but bores holes in the bodies of endless baddies with knives, guns, any object that is available and so on.  Alongside, we have Satyaprakash killing off victims and betrayers (as a lesson) on an electric chair whose voltage increases with the number of views these repulsive videos get online.

Clearly, Sonu’s idea of writing a film is leaving this lion’s share of such sequences to the technical team (action directors, cinematographers, VFX people and the film’s editor), while his concept of direction is having a stony or grimacing hero (himself) making an allowance for occasional romance, terrible background songs, family pathos (in the beginning) and impossible and illogical elements in the cybercrime zone.

How can one like it if a serious and contemporarily vital issue like cybercrime is so terribly trivialized, when thousands of people suffer from it all the time? As per Sood’s storyline, millions of accounts can be hacked in seconds, warnings can be given on videos, and the perpetrators cannot be traced and impounded by law (just because of one corrupt cop!!) but only by this one man and his friend, the hacker.

The case of Fateh eliminating the wrong ‘uns in Khushi’s apartment sees dozens of bodies strewn around, and this ace director of course does not tell us how they were disposed of. But he sure dreams of a sequel if the last scene is any indication! Well…hell!

I am not even pointing at all the technical imitations of Hollywood actioners (and maybe more international cinema) as well as movies like our Animal. Sonu seriously is set on imitating and going beyond a Salman Khan (who pummeled him in Dabanng eons ago, and similar mega-stars down South, where too Sonu has often played the villain). He had started off as hero (with the 2002 Shaheed-E-Azam Bhagat Singh) but veered off to supporting roles mainly.

As a possible compensation, I hear that Sonu Sood has splurged on this misadventure, including shooting in America and Dubai, getting a tepid lullaby recorded abroad for an ‘operatic’ affair and getting a lot of international crew on bored…Oops! I mean board! But the technical side is the only one that deserves plaudits here. And that too, sadly, is a waste of humongous hard work by hundreds of talents, in the final analysis.

The mindful Naseer who criticizes commercial cinema all along (though earning from movies like Tridev, Karma, Vishwatma, Lahoo Ke Do Rang and more) not only deigns to act in this mindless fare but decides to sleepwalk in it. Were the moneys so attractive, sir? The other actors too have no scope in this “violence-a-thon” and Shiv Jyoti Rajput is bland too. Reza’s moll Dolly (Krushna Patil) shows cleavage rather than talent. The only bright spot is Jacqueline Fernandez, though there are a few sequences where her Hindi diction is incomprehensible!

Rating: *

Zee Studios’ & Shakti Sagar Productions’ Fateh  Produced by: Sonali Sood & Umesh KR Bansal  Directed by: Sonu Sood  Written by: Sonu Sood, Ankur Pajni, Sankalp Rawal, Rudra Anand & Shyam Nirmal Music: Vivek Hariharan, Haroon-Gavin, Shabbir Ahmed & YoY o Honey Singh  Starring: Sonu Sood, Jacqueline Fernandez, Naseeruddin Shah, Sheeba Akashdeep, Akashdeep Sabir, Vijay Raaz, Prakash Belawadi, Shiv Jyoti Rajput, Krushna Patil, Dibyendu Bhattacharya, Binnu Dhillon & others

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