The income-tax officer who covered himself in glory in Raid gets his knickers into a twist in Raj Kumar Gupta's follow-up to the 2018 hit. But, as is his wont, he does not stop fighting. He hits a rough patch and then schemes to find a way out of the bind. The conventional narrative arc does Raid 2 no good.
Irrepressible income tax officer Amay Patnaik's latest adventure adds up to a leaden-footed rigmarole that struggles to find its way out of the plodding grind that it quickly turns into.
Raid 2, riding on the star power of Ajay Devgn, buttressed by the presence of Riteish Deshmukh as the antagonist, is a maze of facile contrivances. The outcome does not match the film's ambition and the performances, commendably restrained as they are, fail to offset the drudgery.
Simply put, the efforts that Raid 2 makes in order to look and feel different from its precursor come to nought. The plot is littered with situations and characters, especially politicians, lawyers and officers (all stock figures in a crusade-against-corruption drama such as this) that rarely ring true. The net result is a hole too deep to crawl out of.
Not that the film does not try. The screenplay does well to downplay the key dramatic moments - both Devgn and Deshmukh are alive to the need to keep their onscreen exchanges in the realms of the real - but the tangles that the two characters gets into individually and in opposition with each other not only lack vitality but also veer well away from the believable. The disjuncture between the two contradictory impulses is jarring to say the least.
Raid 2 casts its narrative net wide but fails to rustle up the resources that would have come in handy in making the most of the varied strands that it pulls into its ambit and makes a hash of.
The laboured plot flits from one event to another as it seeks to drive home the unshakeable nature of the protagonist's rectitude and the bad guy's double-faced nature. Its search for the sweet spot proves infructuous.
That is where Raid 2 goes horribly wrong. Granted, that Raid was bound to be a hard act to follow. The sequel only aggravates things by opting for hopelessly worn-out devices. It pits the tough deputy income tax commissioner against Manohar Dhankar alias Dadabhai (Deshmukh), a palpably pious politician-philanthropist revered by the small town of Bhoj, a fact that makes his empire impregnable.
The events in Raid 2 take place in the late 1980s, seven years or so after Amay's protracted and exacting raid on the premises of politician Rameshwar Singh (Saurabh Shukla, who reprises the role and points out that in the fictive domain he has been in jail for exactly the period that separates the two films in the real world) yielded a massive stash of hidden cash.
Another actor - the ever-dependable Amit Sial - returns as income tax officer Lallan Sudhir and animates parts of the film with a chameleon-like act that teeters between the pulpy and the purposeful. But Vaani Kapoor, who replaces Ileana D'Cruz as Amay's wife Malini, makes no difference to the proceedings besides the strictly superficial and physical one between the two actresses.
Raid had played out in Lucknow. Raid 2, too, returns occasionally to the capital of Uttar Pradesh to show the audience what Rameshwar Singh is up to in the aftermath of the troubles that he was dragged through by Amay Patnaik.
Raid 2 opens with a raid on a king in his fort in Rajasthan, an operation that culminates in another transfer for Amay Patnaik. It is his 74th and he isn't obviously taken by surprise.
Amay, his wife and daughter in tow, lands in Bhoj, where Dadabhai is the people's representative everyone loves and adores. The man, on his part, puts his mother (Supriya Pathak) on a pedestal and worships her. He does not begin his day before washing her feet and genuflecting before her with much pomp and show.
A man in a crowd narrates Dadabhai's backstory to Amay. The tale is dramatic, tragic and eventful but is dismissed quickly before the film moves on to other things. But since the larger-than-life Dadabhai is one of the film's two principal characters, the audience is left in no doubt that there will be much more to what is revealed is the hurried recap than meets the eye.
In fact, the script follows an all too obvious thumb rule: everything that it places before the audience is first presented as a simple, even innocuous, plot detail and then, at an opportune point, spun into a story orchestrated and squeezed for full impact. Sadly, rarely do the revelations catch us by surprise.
Is there nothing at all in Raid 2 that could be regarded as a saving grace? There is. Besides the performances - Saurabh Shukla and Amit Sial are both just as solid as Devgn and Deshmukh - what the film benefits from is borrowed from Raid. Not a shot is fired nor is a single punch thrown as Amay Patnaik and his team within the official sphere and outside of it go about their job.
But while the hero stakes his all - his job, his reputation, his peace of mind and the well-being of his family - the film itself aims at low-hanging fruits and loses its way in a maze of mediocre sleights that rely way too much on contrived happenstance for effect.
Raid 2 tells a story about a lot of unaccounted money being unearthed from surprising nooks and crannies, but the film is unlikely to be worth the price of a multiplex ticket and a tub of popcorn unless the fleeting highs that Ajay Devgn and Riteish Deshmukh deliver are reason enough for you to overlook the elements that hold it back from attaining any sort of buoyancy.
Raid was a humdinger. Raid 2 has hum and no zing. It is, at best, average entertainment, if not a few notches below that mark.
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Ajay Devgn, Tamannaah Bhatia, Rajat Kapoor, Riteish Deshmukh
