A Critique on Sarkar Raj

Cast: Amitabh Bachchan, Abhishek Bachchan, Aishwarya Rai, Govind Namdeo, Tanisha Mukherjee, Victor Banerjee, Supriya Pathak

Direction: Ram Gopal Varma

Production: Nitin Chandrachud, Abhijit Ghatak, Praveen Nischol

Written by: Prashant Pandey , Ram Gopal Varma

Overall Rating: 7.5/10.0 (which is defined as a Good to Watch Movie)

Sarkar Raj, set as the sequel of highly acclaimed Sarkar, had to fulfill a lot of high expectations. Ram Gopal Varma had precisely defined the central characters and demarcated the genre in the first part. So in the follow-up he simply had to go ahead and live up to the fame of Sarkar, and I believe he is successful in doing this to a decent level.

The sequel starts with Shankar Nagre (Abhishek Bachchan) taking the reins of the “Family-Business” and Sarkar aka Subhash Nagre (Amitabh Bachchan) taking a backseat from the decision making in the dirty game. The plot unfolds as Anita Ranjan (Aishwarya Rai), an NRI industrialist approaches the Nagre family with a power plant project to be set in the rural lands of Maharashtra under Sarkar’s domain. After initial rebuttal, but with Shankar understanding the intricacies of the progress the project will bring, Sarkar reluctantly gives a go ahead to the venture which soon takes shape of a political conspiracy.

The story then revolves around different sub-plots with a Gujarti businessman wanting to move the plant to Gujarat and power-hungry politicians paying homage to Anita’s greedy father. The movie uses the same dark backgrounds and the same music themes for creating the background ambience. The villainous roles though could have been made better because while Sayaji Shinde hums endlessly, Govind Namdeo and Upendra Limaye look as if they are overdoing the act. Thus the charm of the real dirty game gets lost and it looks like a futile comical sidekick.

Even the screenplay is moulded like the first part, when Shankar wages a political war against his opponents. But here, the roleplay of the father-son duo in this film is in clear contrast to the first part and Shankar becomes the centre-of-attraction. But the main twist is brought when though the father takes a backseat in the initial half giving authority to son, he grabs charge of the proceedings in the concluding portions and Amitabh lives to the word with his master acting in this. The whole movie keeps swapping and justifying the prominence of Abhishek and Amitabh as the drama keeps going on.

From a political war, the film finally shifts track to a regular revenge drama till it arrives to a volatile climax that forms a highlight of the movie, escalating the level of the entire plot. As far as the movie goes, full points to RGV for bringing the same effect of “Non-verbal communication” as it was in Sarkar, with the characters displaying perfect emotions with just a few words. The highlight of the movie was also the relationship that was shown between Shankar and Sarkar and the bond of unsaid love between a father and a son is beautifully depicted.

From the cast, Aishwarya Rai looks stunningly gorgeous as a business women, but from a story point of view, she plays a mere spectator to the scenes than a participant to the politics. She is her usual self and her act doesn’t have anything special. More so, the movie never really focuses on her as the screen-play is always revolving around the Nagre family. Amitabh and Abhishek Bachchan, once again, employ the intensity of their piercing eyes to add magic to the movie.

Final Verdict: Sarkar Raj was widely heralded as an homage to the GodFather trilogy, but except for a few far-fetched similarities, the movie has been highly-Indianized and hence it differentiates from the GodFather giving rise to a new adventure series, that of the Nagre Family. A must watch for everyone who loved Sarkar.