This is one of those kinds of movies I’m not sure I should be talking about since it clearly isn’t for me, but I will.

I go to these screenings of Indian movies every once in a while, because they don’t happen in my home town, but they do happen in a town I visit regularly. Usually I’m the only white person there, but this time there was one other. Since I always take a seat at the front, the sold seats on the app looked like a big arrow made of people of Indian heritage pointing at me, which I found funny.

This is a semi-historical movie based on a Marathi language book about a real ruler of the Maratha empire, who goes to war against the Mughal empire that was dominant in the Indian subcontinent and many areas around it at the time.

There isn’t much more than that to the plot. There are some botched B-plots here and there, but they are handled quite badly. For exmaple, there’s a poet serving our main character, who early on tells his comrades that he knows that they don’t all trust him, because he wasn’t born there. Then, two hours later, this suddenly become important, but because there were no reminders of this, I was just confused for a while about who this character is and why is he bring up loyalty again. Many other B-plots come in and are just resolved in the next scene without any real stakes.

And that’s the problem with the movie overall. The main character needs to look so cool and superior that there is no peril here. The movie begins with a long battle sequence which basically makes him look like a superhuman being, who is at no risk at any point. While there are distractions here and there, that’s pretty much the whole movie until the very end and the movie is 2 hours and 40 minutes. The amount of violence just becomes numbing. They try to vary it by having the good guys use different weapons in different situations, but it just ins’t enough.

For context, I am a person who enjoys movie violence. I love Crank despite the Chavios’ problematic nature, because it doesn’t overstay it’s welcome and it doesn’t take itself very seriously. I love Mad Max Fury Road even more, because it has stakes. I love certain action scenes in superhero movies, like Harley Quinns escape in The Suicide Squad (the newer, James Gunn on), because of the interesting and inventive choreography. I really don’t mind violence, but this movie just overdoes it on a level that by the time we get to the climax of the movie, I was just done. It was like they just tried to hit some kind of a record for on-screen kills without thinking how it would affect the overall experience.

The movie tells us in the beginning that it is not targeting any religion. My guess here is that Netflix, as the streaming partner, wanted to include this as Mughal empire was Islamic. However, they seem to forget this quite fast, as only a few minutes into the movie, we see people gloating over having gathered all this wealth from non-Muslims as taxes. They specifically say that and still expect us to believe that they are not against Muslims as a group. On top of the ridiculous idea that you could gather taxes in gold and other such riches only, is just stupid, as most of them would have been gathered in things that the people actually have, because you still need to feed and arm your massive armies.

Before I get to spoilers for the ending, I’m just going to say that I did not enjoy this movie. Usually the Indian movies that actually reach our shores, are top notch. This just looks great, but is mediocre at best. Maybe, if you are interested in fight choreography, this might be of interest to you, but even then I would study the whole thing one fight at a time, not as a movie.

But spoiler time about the ending of the movie, but since the plot is so light, this doesn’t actually matter.

So, they finally catch our hero. This actually comes after he and a handful of other men have killed most of a five thousand strong army before they figure out that they need to restrict his arms in order to beat him. There’s like a few dozen of the army left and our hero is the only one left of his forces, except that he let’s out a bellow that is so loud that one of his men just springs up only to be captured as well (this is actually the poet I mentioned before).

This leads to a very long torture porn sequence. This is reminiscent of the ending of Braveheart (so spoilers for that movie as well) except that it gets gorier and is much, much longer. We are just looking at this piece of meat that used to be a man, who is just bleeding. It is just so different from the tone of the rest of the movie that it feels very jarring, although the nature of the whole sequence is very jarring as well and it all feels so unnecessary. You can do long scenes in a very compelling way, but this just isn’t it.