Baaghi 3 Movie Review: Tiger Shroff's action can't save the cringe screenplay

Cast: Tiger Shroff, Shraddha Kapoor, and Ritesh Deshmukh

Directed By: Ahmed Khan

What you expect from a Tiger Shroff film, high-octane over-the-top action sequences, cheesy one-liners and glossy songs. And you will get everything and more than this in the film. 

Baaghi 3 is the official remake of the 2012 Tamil blockbuster Vettai starring Arya and R Madhavan. The film is true to it's original but goes bizarre when Tiger goes to Syria to save his brother from terrorist and fight against the whole country.

Director Ahmed Khan throws in every trick in the book to make Baaghi 3 an action entertainer with elements that highlight his leading man’s brute force and deadly machismo. Tiger Shroff, who is clearly one of Bollywood’s most bankable action stars, delivers a knockout blow in the high-octane action scenes. His perfect body and attitude make all the stylized action look real. 

However, he falls short in emotional scenes and comedy. Shraddha Kapoor looks beautiful and brings in some good comic relief in the first half. But her character isn’t very crucial to the story and hence, she doesn’t have much scope to perform. Riteish Deshmukh, on the other hand, has an important role, but there is no explanation about why he acts like a slow man-child and why he needs to be constantly protected. It is baffling to see him recruited as a police officer despite being so vulnerable and his performance is inconsistent too. In fact, there are quite a few such loose ends in the story that make it far less convincing.

Vikram gets into the police force after the death of their inspector father (Jackie Shroff). Law and order in Agra are neatly divided between the siblings. Ronnie does all the bone-breaking and Vikram gets all the credit. The brothers are in such good sync that they even score with a pair of sisters (Ankita Lokhande as Vikram’s wife, Shraddha Kapoor as Ronnie’s girlfriend). 

The division of labor works out a bit too well for Vikram: he is sent to Syria in pursuit of IPL (Jaideep Ahlawat), a local thug who has been kidnapping Agra’s residents and shipping them off to Abu so that he may deploy them as suicide bombers. When Abu captures Vikram, the movie unleashes Ronnie on Syria/Serbia, and its impact on geopolitics in the Middle East can only be imagined.

While the Syrian setting brings in a terrifying feeling, most villains are far too caricaturish to be taken seriously, barring the main villain Abu Jalal (Jameel Khoury). He looks the part and his performance is chilling. Among the other actors, Jackie Shroff, Ankita Lokhande and Vijay Varma lend good support. 

The dialogues by Farhad Samji are laced with low-brow humor, especially in the first half and adequately filmy in the second half. The film’s music is quite average but thankfully, there aren’t too many songs. A skimpily clad Disha Patani sizzles in a scintillating item number that adds a dash of glamour in this stylish actioner. While the action design (Ahmed Khan) is impressive, the same cannot be said for the shaky camerawork and weak CGI.

If you are an action movie lover then Baaghi 3 will make your day but you have to bear the bad screenplay of the film and gulp all the unbelievability going on the screen.