It’s been two years since we last saw Tiger Shroff in the god-awful Heropanti, and while he’s clearly kept himself busy acquiring a range of martial arts skills (and a few more muscles, no doubt), he doesn’t appear to have used that time to brush up on his acting, if the new Baaghi—brought to us by the same director-producer duo behind Heropanti—is anything to go by. Which means that Mr Shroff, though no doubt lither and more assured in his physical stunts than ever before, still struggles to convey the most basic of emotions with his face—that blank, inanimate thing that sits atop his always shiny, almost ridiculously chiseled and very frequently shirtless body. 

Of course, it’s unfair to lay all the blame for Baaghi’s inadequacies at the actor’s feet, given that the film also suffers from a script that is lacking sorely in logic and inventiveness, which it tries, and fails, to cover up with heavy stylistic flourishes. It’s also surprisingly regressive for a 2016 production; despite all the ‘modern’ trappings—namely, glossy cinematography, slick action set-pieces, exotic foreign locales and a pair of hiply-outfitted young stars who, don’t you know, even lock lips at one point (cue the exclamation point)—Baaghi is, at heart, very, very old fashioned, relying on a series of clichés that you’d have expected from Bollywood films a fair few decades ago. Director Sabbir Khan and writer Sanjeev Dutta have essentially taken the most basic romantic triangle structure one could think of, plugged in some martial arts elements into the mix, and a few none-too-memorable songs to please the punters, and called it a day. 

The story revolves around a young man called Ronny (Shroff) who is headed, as per his dying father’s instructions, to KRAMA, a super exclusive martial arts training academy in lush Kerala specialising in the Kalaripayattu form and headed by the stone-faced Mr Miyagi stand-in Guruswami (real-life trainer Shifuji Shaurya Bharadwaj). Before Ronny can get to the camp, however, a meet-cute is in order with Sia (Shraddha Kapoor), an aspiring actress—they bump into each other on the train, discuss the weather, spar coyly as all young would-be couples must, and some song and dance later, love is very much in the air. But there’s someone else ogling at Sia from the sidelines; Raghav (Telugu actor Sudheer Babu), who happens to be Guruswami’s son and a skilled martial artist himself, and who also operates illegal (?) fight clubs in Thailand—a fact poor ol’ dad doesn’t seem to be aware of—has latched his hooded eyes onto our girl, and, in the tradition of romantic goons everywhere, is determined to have her, whether she likes it or not. 

Ronny, blissfully unaware of this, begins training at the academy, and naturally, starts off all arrogant-like (you know the drill) before Guruswami whips him into shape and teaches him a few life lessons. Surprise, surprise, he turns out to be a prodigy, and is soon the star student at KRAMA. Raghav, meanwhile, is seething at being upstaged on both professional and personal turfs by this new upstart, and soon decides to take drastic measures to set things straight, including kidnapping Sia. So now, Ronny must draw on everything he’s learned from his master, and defeat the formidable obstacle course that Raghav has set up, to rescue the love of his life. 

It’s probably clear from the synopsis above that Baaghi’s storyline is, well, a little silly. Logic feels entirely dispensable here, weaving in and out as it pleases. Of course, I’m not implying that the film warrants realism as such, but a touch of inner coherence would’ve been nice, where at least within the world and context of its making, it made some kind of sense. No such luck, however. Instead, we have a series of action sequences strung together by a wafer-thin plotline that fails to engage in any way: at no point do you believe or feel invested in what you’re watching. Even the dialogues comprise the sort of shabby, stilted, filmy writing whose sole purpose is to put forward some catchy tagline hopefuls—and plug the film’s title with annoying regularity, which, speaking of, I don’t fully understand, because what rebellion does it refer to specifically?—rather than represent actual conversations between actual humans. And, as if it weren’t enough to suffer through the film once, Baaghi also features too-frequent flashbacks of previous scenes—because audiences need to be reminded of things that happened mere minutes ago—so we might as well be watching everything all over again. 

Baaghi’s narrative is also highly derivative—besides being the official Hindi adaptation of the Telugu film Varsham, most notable among its inspirations is 2011’s The Raid: Redemption from which a key plot point is lifted, as well as having touches of The Karate Kid and Jackie Chan’s Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow thrown in, among others. The pinching would’ve been at least forgivable had the final outcomeproved better; unfortunately, for all the freedom with which it has picked and lifted from a range of sources, the film struggles to place those bits in a cohesive order or flow, resulting in a tiresome, seriously overlong two-hour-plus watch. 

Some semblance of chemistry between the leads could’ve perhaps alleviated the tedium somewhat, but Shroff and Kapoor, while in possession of impressive physiques—not to mention being constantly dripping wet, a running gag of sorts—produce zero sparks onscreen. Shroff’s performance is so bizarrely uneven as to be unintentionally funny: one minute he’ll be balancing his entire body weight on one finger and beating down three men at once, and the very next he’s giggling like a little kid, practically skipping. Kapoor, meanwhile, is wasted in a severely dated role; while a decent actress, she’s in danger of boxing herself in by playing too-similar characters in her films. Khan gives her a few opportunities to kick and punch baddies, but these are crumbs, really, and it’s pointless to hope for anything really subversive: Sia is a damsel in distress through and through and there’s only so much agency she’s allowed. The rest of the cast are too flimsily drawn to even really register: Babu is a caricature of a villain if there ever was one, and there are a number of super-grating ‘comic relief’ inserts, courtesy of Sanjay Mishra, Sumit Gulati and Sunil Grover that should’ve frankly just been tossed on the cutting room floor. 

The only, albeit very tiny, patch of light in this film, then, are the action segments, and this is where Shroff really shines. While such sequences can often be too busy and difficult to follow, you can tell that a lot of thought has gone into the fight choreography here—we don’t lose track of who’s doing what and it’s actually fun watching Ronny and his anointed foes execute a variety of impossible bodily feats. Though there are times when things get a touch too hammy, like in one of the climactic scenes where we’re offered the totally unnecessary benefits of X-ray vision. 

While Baaghi is a definite step up from Shroff’s first film, and surprisingly entertaining in a few places, that’s hardly enough to recommend it. Its primary flaw lies in the fact that though borrowing liberally from other films, it is unable to weave what it borrows into a meaningful whole. As for Shroff, this is strike two, and the actor needs to shape up, in more ways than one.