Without beating around the bush, let’s just say Hari Hara Veera Mallu, with Pawan Kalyan in the title role, is an absurdity of epic proportions. It demonises the Mughals to caricaturish dimensions. Bobby Deol’s Aurangzeb is not a character: it is a tool to weaponise the Hindu warriors into action, well …one Hindu warrior to be precise in this imprecise, hectic homage to nationalism.
Pawan claims to be enacting scenes from actual history in this onscreen fight to retrieve the Kohinoor from the fiendish Mughals. But there is no evidence in the history books to verify this claim. The entire exercise in pseudo-Hindutva is steeped in mediocrity. The characters are shown either to be hideously tyrannical or unquestionably altruistic.
Sachin Khedekar, who once played Subhas Chandra Bose, is here reduced to playing a buffoonish provincial maharaja with little control over his subjects. Like the peasantry, the narrative scrambles all over the place, as though the screenwriters wrote the plot in between breaks from their other assignments.
Striding languidly across this colossally indolent writing is Pawan Kalyan. Like Ajay Devgn, he projects minimalist screen heroism. Less many be more for Kalyan. But when you are riding through Baahubaali territory (on a horse that has seen better days), you need to instil more vigour, more mojo in your screen antics.
Pawan Kalyan doesn’t make any effort to embrace dynamism. He is content being the subdued, sleepy Robin Hood. He knows the audience is with him.
Regrettably, the same can’t be said about the screenplay, which zigzags like a drunken monk seeking inspiration in the most asinine screen situations, which are based on the premise of the plunderers being shown their place by one Braveheart.
The saffron colour remains shining, if not on screen than in spirit. Bobby Deol makes a surprisingly absent-minded Aurangzeb, while Kabir Bedi, as his dad Shahjahan, seems to have lost his habitual regal quality. It happens to the best of them when faced with a script that insists on mowing down all aesthetics in favour of a free-for-all atmosphere of desecrated history.
