The film is strewn with worse lapses of logic and factual accuracy. The predator-pacifist duality does not sit all that pretty on the lead actor who appears to be constantly straining at the leash to break out of the shell that the screenplay buttonholes him into. In fact, his best friend Vilayati (Sunil Grover in an extended role that he puts his heart and soul into) suggests that our man Bharat is the sort of guy who cannot hurt an ant. But at no juncture of the rest of the film does the man show any tiger-like qualities.
" Sher buddha ho gaya hai par shikaar karna nahi bhula (The tiger has grown old, but hasn't lost his instinct for hunting)," he thunders. He takes the broker to a dark backroom and puts a noose around his neck - this is incidentally the only time that Bharat threatens any sort of violence until he shifts, pre-climax, to action-hero mode and stands up to four motorcycle-borne goons. The protagonist, a day shy of 70, is livid. In the opening sequence of Bharat, a greedy, garrulous old Delhi trader named Gulati (a delightfully droll Rajiv Gupta) arrives at the eponymous hero's Hind Ration Store along with a 'foreign investor' (a non-speaking part essayed by the film's director of photography Marcin Laskawiec) with an offer to buy out the shop so as to pave the way for a mall in the locality. It needed smarter, snappier editing to shed its flab.īharat Movie Review: A still from the film. The film plods its way through a string of implausible situations that are sought to be enlivened through the means of infantile humour and superficial emotions.īharat is marred by patchy writing, a sloppy approach to period details, costumes that look completely out of place - in the 1950s, an anachronistic Disha Patani pops up as a circus performer who dresses and acts like a 2019 item girl - and a somnolent pace aggravated by writer-director Ali Abbas Zafar's tendency to drag out scenes to snapping point.
Despite a few sequences that are mildly interesting, especially the climactic passages centred on a television show designed to help Partition victims reunite with their loved ones, the potential of the ambitious storyline remains largely unrealised.
But what the film delivers is way short of the bar that it sets for itself. A purported epic about a man and a nation who share a name, Bharat, riding on the shoulders of an ageing superstar who goes from 17 to 70 in the course of the 167-minute drama, promises a great deal.
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