Salaar Review: An Ambitious Mass Movie, Whose Ambitions Frequently Clash With Its Mass-ness

Director: Prashanth Neel

Cast: Prabhas, Prithviraj Sukumaran, Shruti Haasan, Tinu Anand, Eshwari Rao, Jagapathi Babu, Sriya Reddy, Garuda Ram

Available in: Theatres

Duration: 172 minutes

Salaar: Part I - Ceasefire is, at its core, a mass movie. Yet, it aspires to be so much more: at its heart is a city-state built by warring tribes that have walled themselves off from the world and evolved into militaristic outfits. There is a Game-of-Thrones style battle for power within these walls and a criminal empire that stretches out from them. This is a world of soot, fumes, and blood. It is rendered almost wholly in black, brown, and red: several scenes feel like they belong in a horror film.

These loftier ambitions frequently clash with what it has to be: a Prabhas vehicle. There is a subterranean conflict between its need for its characters to be rich, textured, independent chess pieces in the game for Khansaar, and the compulsion for these characters to be easily slayed by, shocked by, or reduced to singing praises of its hero. What we get as a result, is an awkward tug-of-war between the two that is in equal parts intriguing and frustrating to watch, where the world-building and the mass-pandering frequently interrupt and sabotage each other. This doesn’t have the easy alchemy of mass and mythology that Baahubali had, and yet the alchemy it does try to achieve is much more layered, much more variegated.

It could be tempting to say that the film should have leaned more on its ambitions—and yet this view is complicated by the fact that Prashant Neel is a skilled technician of mass. His trademark “elevations” : the valorisation of the hero through montage (typically assembled in a way that resembles Christopher Nolan’s climactic sequences), where slivers of scenes from different timelines culminate to pave the way for violence and heroic glory—are all here, and are much more proficiently done than in KGF. So much of Salaar’s DNA is familiar (moreso if you have watched Neel’s debut Ugramm)—the hero’s relationship with the mother, the thinly written women who exist only to be abducted by lecherous villains, the hero’s laconic demeanor. Sift through its elements and you can see bits of Baasha (1995), Padayappa (1999), Thalapathi (1991), and maybe even some Kaala Patthar (1979).

One of Salaar’s strengths is that Neel understands Prabhas’ appeal—there are hints of the laidback goofball persona that characterized much of his pre Baahubali work early on in the film when he hangs out with the children in the mining town he works in. Bhuvan Gowda’s compositions frequently emphasize his physique when the violence breaks out, though it is a pity that the “elevations” which precede the fight sequences frequently overshadow the fights themselves, which are shoddily edited and lack thrust. (The standout set piece is a ritual killing that is reminiscent of the one in Simhadri).

Prithviraj Sukumaran turns in the film’s best performance as Vardharaja Mannar, Salaar’s closest friend. Much of the second half centers him, as the film begins to unravel its world and its politics for us. Some of this is tedious, particularly the expositional chunks—but we also get well-incorporated hints at rituals, rules, and systems in Khansaar. Despite an able supporting cast (Brahmaji, Easwari Rao, Jagapathi Babu, Tinnu Anand, Ramachandra Raju, Jhansi), the characters played by them lack dimension, and this is a serious flaw—it prevents us from being invested in this world or caring about their internecine conflicts beyond rooting for the hero we’ve been conditioned to root for. 

(Mild spoilers ahead)

As the film proceeds towards its third act, the tension between the mass-film and the fantasy/sci-fi epic becomes more explicit and the world-building begins to come apart at the seams. The degree to which we’re expected to suspend our disbelief goes up exponentially as multiple (important) people are slaughtered during a supposed ceasefire and a zombiesque swarm is awkwardly manufactured to act as fodder for heroic violence. Some of this is redeemed by the final cliffhanger which deepens the story, and yet there is a definite sense of tedium by the time the credits roll.

For a lot of Salaar’s runtime, I found myself admiring its aesthetics and its technique—the way the costumes were consistent with a society that evolved from warrior tribes into a modern militaristic empire, the way the film adapts the desaturated visual aesthetic of Zack Snyder’s filmography to an Indian context seamlessly, the effort that went into its world-building and its editing. Yet, I wasn’t moving with it, and I wasn’t in love with its world the way it clearly wanted me to be. Are mass films meant to be admired for their surface, and at a distance? But show me another with this much texture.