Baaghi 4 Review | Hallucinations for the Hero, Delusions for the Makers, Exhaustion for the Audience

Baaghi has been one of those franchises from Sajid Nadiadwala that kept on going despite not being anyone’s favorite. Started off with mediocre quality, Baaghi films, much like the Housefull movies, have only become worse, and this time too, the audience is subject to extreme torture. The ironic part about the films in this franchise is that they have basically done remakes of fairly okay films from various languages, and they have always butchered all those films. And that is the only consistency Nadiadwala can claim about this franchise. When it comes to Baaghi 4, Tiger Shroff is adding bass to his voice along with a visible increase in his facial hair. However, this reimagination of the 2013 Tamil movie Ainthu Ainthu Ainthu is one more proof of the creative cluelessness of Bollywood.

Roney 4 is a Navy officer, and it is shown to us in the beginning that he was involved in a really bad road accident and was in a coma for a long time. When he woke up, he was talking about this girl named Alisha. Nobody could find out any details about Alisha, and the doctor told Rony that Alisha was his hallucination and that she didn’t exist in real life. What we see in the movie is Roney’s efforts to understand why he was having these hallucinations.

Directed by Kannada director A Harsha, this remake movie’s Story and screenplay credit is given to the producer Sajid Nadiadwala. Well, he has definitely made changes to the source material, and it is great to see that he owns up to his mistake by taking the credits. In the original film, even though the idea was pretty much the same, the scale was smaller, and the storytelling had that grounded feel. The lookalike obsession of the villain felt much more sensible, because it was a flashback Story and the past of the villain was in a rooted setting. Sajid Nadiadwala takes that idea and tortures it by infusing Animal into it. The staging of the scene where the hero realizes it wasn’t a hallucination was so real in the original, and here we see a dumber version of the mask fight in Animal. And the backstory of the villain is so outlandish that Nadiadwala, thinking this is so creative, answers the reason why most of his recent films are mental torture for the audience.

Denser beard, trimmed hair, and the same old abs, along with unnecessary bass in voice, have definitely made Tiger Shroff look different from the outside. However, the limitations in his performance remain the same. Some of Roney’s emotional outbursts are either witty or facepalm-worthy. Debutant Harnaaz Sandhu, in most parts of the movie, is just there to be objectified. In the second half of the film, where the makers have tried to create a new backstory for the villain, Sandhu is supposed to play a cooler and wilder character. The design and writing of that character were terrible, and Harnaaz couldn’t pull off such levels of swagger. Sanjay Dutt gets to do this, always screaming, always laughing, mad villain role, and he basically sleepwalks through that terribly imagined villain who just won’t die. Sonam Bajwa’s role in the original had a lot more prominence, and here she is reduced to an item number girl. Since it is Baaghi and Roney needs a brother, Shreyas Talpade is doing that role instead of Ritesh Deshmukh. Upendra Limaye’s police character is something they have created mostly because of the success he gained after Animal, and it was perhaps the only fun thing about this whole movie.

The last Baaghi film, Baaghi 3, directed by Ahmed Khan, was also a torture, and it was largely because of the illogical action blocks in the movie. This time, the action is taking a back seat, and it is the logic of the romance that is making us laugh at the film. There is a line towards the end of the movie where the villain Chacko, played by Sanjay Dutt, says, after Heer Ranjha, Romeo and Juliet, and Laila and Majnu, the world should be celebrating Chacko and Avantika. The confidence the makers have to write such a line is what I aspire to have in my life. Every location in the movie feels like a set, and the usage of green screen in shots that showed Roney working in the Navy looked really shabby. The fights this time are more about cutting and slicing, and it just goes on and on without any sort of creativity.

We all thought the kind of roasting movies like Housefull 4 and Baaghi 3 received would make producers rethink how they should build IP-based franchises. Well, looking at the lack of acknowledgement towards the flak they got for those movies in the sequels that got made, it is pretty obvious that producers like Sajid Nadiadwala are assuming people are dumb, or he wants to keep them in a dumb zone so that his Housefull, Baaghi, Heropanti factory can make more products with the same structure. Baaghi 3 at least offered unintentional comedy. This one is just a big fat meh.