Never Ending Movie Carnival
Never Ending Movie Carnival
Agni review: Fiery start, problematic finish!
What: Rahul Dholakia is a master of atmosphere. He constructs tense and dramas pitched against fiery backdrops. His 2007 national-award winning Parzania, based on the Gujarat riots, simmered in the cauldron of fire. Next, the SRK-starrer RAEES inspired from real life a bootlegger turned messiah of the poor, treading on the line of fire. Fire formed an essential element in his slim filmography. Agni, his latest on the OTT, embraces the title in literal and figurative mode. Serving as a cinematic tribute to the unsung heroes – the Firefighters who brave danger at every step in their mission to save lives, the film follows the mysterious rise of fire mishaps in the city of Mumbai while chronicling their passion and agony born out of their thankless duty.
Agni movie synopsis
The fire department is on its toes – when a series of mishaps grapple the city under their fumes and frenzy. It takes a little while for the honest Vittal Rao Surve (Pratik Gandhi) and his team comprising Avni (Saiyami Kher), Jazz (Udit Arora) and Mahadev (Jitendra Joshi) to figure out that these alarming incidents are cases of arson and maneuvered with sinister intentions, which is dismissed by the police department and his brother-in-law, Samit Sawant (Divyendu Sharma) playing a shrewd and medal-hungry cop. With rising tension and bodies in his department piling up, Surve navigates both professional chaos and personal woes when his own son doesn’t heroize him but his mama.
Dholakia pitches the conflict of egos between the two men while displaying the nuances of interpersonal relationships and examining grief at the brink of melancholy and mayhem. An interesting interplay of emotions is observed over a dining table when Sai Tamhankar (playing Pratik’s wife) tries to bridge and reconcile the men at loggerheads, with one of them asked to tender an apology to the other. Along with co-writer Vijay Maurya, Dholakia conjures real and lived-in moments of the middle class in the city as well as the ugly apathy of the politicians towards the grim situation.
The film is superb in the technical aspects -an intriguing background score and top-notch camerawork to depict the myriad fire crises. Agni is mounted on an impressive scale and being backed by Excel Entertainment (Farhan Akhtar, Ritesh Sidhwani) boasts of high production values that demands a large screen viewing experience. It is well-performed with a strong and stellar cast that rises above the script in hand. Pratik Gandhi carves a genuine portrait of an honest and diligent middle class officer battling angst and yearning for a much-deserved recognition. Divyendu Sharma is exciting to watch. I have realized that this actor has an amazing appetite for assimilating varied characters - a craft that very few of his colleagues might have honed in recent days. Jitendra Joshi is decent, but his character certainly required more chiseling. The female brigade doesn’t get much scope to perform, which leaves only Saiyami Kher to draw inspiration from the real-life woman firefighter Harshini Khanekar and portray the strength and resilience inherent to the character with sincerity.
But all said and done, the drama doesn’t hold the fire long and descends to an underwhelming mess of stereotypical finish. After the chief revelation, things move on a predictable trajectory and squander the combustible energy of a meaty thriller. And the motivation behind the architect of all the explosions is not given enough fuel to sizzle. Rather, the message it sends out is problematic. It could have been a well etched-out story conveying the grit, guts and gumption of these heroes but leaves much to be desired.
Agni movie review – final words
‘Agni’ starts off well but exhausts its combustible material, fizzling to a botched up and contrived ending.
Ahwaan Padhee, is an IT Techie/Business Consultant by profession and a film critic/cinephile by passion, is also associated with Radio Playback as well, loves writing and conducting movie quizzes. More By Ahwaan Padhee