An Action Hero movie review: Ayushmann Khurrana, Jaideep Ahlawat set the house ablaze in this intelligent comedy

3.5/5

STORY: Manav enjoys the kind of superstardom all strugglers (and established actors) want to be bestowed with in Bollywood—smart, snooty, suave and a fanbase to kill for! And kill-a-fan he does, or does he? This dark action comedy, by debutant Anirudh Iyer, is mad... MAD fun!

REVIEW: A luxury sports car that you probably do not even know the name of, a quintessential Bollywood hero and all the starry tantrums that usually comes with the package, slo-mo fight sequences and a climax that almost always glamourises the already-glamourised actor … Ayushmann Khurrana, in An Action Hero, lives the life of an untouchale star. An actor who is worshipped by most but known by just a select few, Khurrana’s Manav throws money around to buy loyalty and when he is not flicking cars or twisting the arms of bhaade-ke-gunde, he is blowing up the cash he has amassed through blowing up buildings. “Fancy!” we say, but how would a dark action comedy move forward without a conflict-resolution arrangement? In comes the Haryanvi Jatt, with a very cute accent, Bhoora Solanki (Jaideep Ahlawat). On a fateful day, while shooting in one of the hamlets that Solanki is the head of, Manav accidentally pushes his brother Vicky to his death. ‘Accidentally’ being the keyword here.

Anirudh Iyer’s film has got cool caper vibes, which is an amalgamation of situational comedy and conversational humour, and it is one of those films that scores brownie points for its wit, too. Granted: Iyer, along with screenwriter Neeraj Yadav, has spent those initial moments of the film quite leisurely—obsessively building the story from ground up—thereby wasting a crucial amount of time DEPRIVING us all of what is definitely the highlight of An Action Hero: the constant tussle; shifting power dynamics, between Manav and Solanki.

Cut to post interval, and the film gallops through one outrageously funny sequence after the other with the confidence of a movie star who knows the film is going to land where it's supposed to. Sample this: “Aapki tarif?,” asks an absconding Urdu-speaking don, to which, Solanki says, “Main khud nahin karta.” In that regard, Iyer is an intelligent filmmaker, too, for not a lot of directors would risk inculcating a certain bomb blast mastermind into their first script, let alone that character laughing at his own depiction in the movie A Wednesday. But, surprisingly, with An Action Hero, you keep the sensitive aspect to your side, aside, and laugh along even when a racist joke is hurled at a Chinese hacker. Iyer’s constant jibes at the media was astonishingly welcome. A journalist during the Delhi press screening quipped, which I overheard, “Itna sach nahin dikhana tha.” I second that.

Ayushmann Khurrana, with that back-swept hair and an outpour of energy, I thought, would break into the classic jaanta-nahin-mera-baap-kaun-hai dialogue any moment during the course of the movie. He doesn’t. If anything—and I say this at the risk of sounding condescending—Khuranna takes to the Bollywood ‘antics’ act like a fish to water. As I mentioned before, he is snooty, suave and oh-so-smart. And, matching his formidable spirit in the movie is Jaideep Ahlawat’s ‘mand buddhi’, brash act as Solanki. Be it his colloquial accent, or the kohl-rimmed hollow eyes, or just the fact that he is an excellent actor: everything that Ahlawat does in the movie only goes only on to prove his mettle as a performer.

An Action Hero, as the title suggests, is, at the end of a very satisfying movie, an ode to the larger-than-life heroes of Bollywood, and its villains. And, on top of that, if you are a cynic who loves to see the rich and famous being dragged through the gates of hell, you are going to devour this film and not even burp once.

VERDICT: Forget about the questionable choice of title, An Action Hero is actually an intelligent dark comedy that will leave you in splits on more than one occasion. And that, for any moviegoer, is good enough reason to give it a go.