Dark, disturbing and full of gore, Fateh is gung-ho in its efforts to make this stylised action yarn as brutal as possible, observes Mayur Sanap.
Post Animal, there's a shift in Bollywood action movies as seen from a gleeful ambition in making the violence look sexy on screen.
In Sonu Sood's directorial debut Fateh, violence is not just the driving force behind the action, it forms the entire personality of the film.
Dark, disturbing and full of gore, Fateh is gung-ho in its efforts to make this stylised action yarn as brutal as possible. But if you strip all that away, Sood's action romp is a pretty basic genre film.
Sonu Sood plays Fateh, a man of mysterious origin, who believes he has put his violent past behind him. He dedicates himself to creating a quiet new life as a dairy farm supervisor in Punjab's Moga, the place Sood actually hails from.
When a village girl Nimrat (Shivjyoti Rajput) is abducted by cybercrime mobsters, Fateh realises many of his villagers have fallen prey to cyber cons by signing up for fraudulent loan schemes.
Disturbed by the grim happenings around him, Fateh emerges as an avenging angel, who goes against the corrupt system that exploits the helpless.
From the first frame, we know this is a star vehicle for Sood that puts his brooding machismo and mean action avatar to the front. But there's nothing unique about this character design, which takes heavy cues from the likes of The Equalizer, Wrath of Man and John Wick.
Sood and his writing partner Ankur Pajni craft a conspiracy thriller about technology perils, so we have words Data Breach, Cyber Attack and DeepFake thrown at us every now and then, but pretty much all of it feels lame due to a pedestrian script.
What keeps the momentum going is the sleek action.
Sood shows great flair in the staging of action set pieces with an interesting mix of grim tone and offhanded humour that makes for some genuinely crowd-pleasing moments. There's groovy style to the action choreography that Lee Whittaker has designed and Director Of Photography Vincenzo Condorelli's stylish shots make these scenes hit hard and heavy.
'Usse jaan jaoge to jaan jaayegi (you will be dead if you get to know him)', a character warns another one which makes Fateh feel more like a Terminator-like figure than an actual human being.
Sood wears the badassery of his character to great style and effect. He does spout a few quippy lines and packs a punch in a well-rehearsed dance of violence and chaos.
Sadly, the focus is solely on Sood's brawny hero which relegates other characters to one-note, including Naseeruddin Shah and Vijay Raaz who come across as villain no 1, villain no 2 due to nothing significant to do.
Jacqueliene Fernandez plays the most random character of a glasses-sporting computer geek, an 'ethical hacker' who 'hates guns and violence' only to turn into a doe-eyed love interest who serves no purpose whatsoever.
Fateh, for all its worth, is a standard fare. But the brutal ways it finds to redeem itself makes it much more interesting than it deserves to be. And that's a big win.
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