Vikas Bahl’s ‘Ganapath’ wants to be an origins story for a (super)hero, but wannabe is all it is

The sci-fi film stars Tiger Shroff, Kriti Sanon, Amitabh Bachchan. The uninspired writing ensures that nothing works.

The movies keep getting bigger, but the focus on writing keeps getting smaller. The latest instance of this theory is , directed by Vikas Bahl. Every director is allowed a mistake or two, and we cannot expect a or a every time – but this movie looks like the work of someone who didn’t even try. It looks like the work of someone who yawned instead of saying “Action” and “Cut”! We are in a future world, after a big war has laid waste the land. The Evil Rich live in a glittering, gadget-filled place named Silver City, and the poor exist on the outskirts, waiting for The One to come and save them. Now, given that Tiger Shroff is the leading man, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to guess he is The One. But as – one of the classics of this sub-genre – showed us, it is not the destination but the journey that matters.

And this journey is a slog. Even if you get past the iffy effects, the iffy animation, the iffy acting, the iffy world-building, you cannot forgive the iffy writing. We are asked to believe that the protagonist is on the side of the Evil Rich when everyone knows that the leading man . So the film desperately tries to make us believe the Tiger character is going to stick it to the poor, while we wait impatiently for the twist that will tell us that he was a good guy all along and was just . You don’t say! Just like everyone involved with this mess was just…  , I guess. I could go on about, say, Kriti Sanon needing to choose better films, or the character Amitabh Bachchan slèepwalks through – but why bother when there are more layers on Tiger’s torso than in the script. If the future is as bleak as this wannabe franchise-starter, we are truly doomed.

You can watch the trailer here:

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