Saala Khadoos
Director: Sudha Kongara Prasad
Starring: R Madhavan, Ritika Singh, Mumtaz Sorcar, Zakir Hussain
Two stars
If you can resist the temptation to leave the cinema during the first half of Saala Khadoos, you might actually feel like you got your money's worth – to some extent, at least.
But be warned, the film’s cast will make it very hard for you to stick around for those first 60 minutes or so.
The film has a fairly simple, standard premise, as far as sports films go. Adi Tomar (R Madhavan) is an ill-tempered, middle-aged boxing coach who is seriously annoyed with his former guru, Dev Khatri (Zakir Hussain), for betraying him during the most important match of his life, and with the corrupt “system” .
The film opens with him working as a women’s boxing coach in Hisar. Even before the opening credits, he has been packed off to Chennai to train an entirely underwhelming group of girls who are not expected to achieve anything.
There he discovers Madhi (newcomer Ritika Singh), a foul-mouthed fisherwoman who, like him, is khadoos (a snob) but also has raw talents that matches Adi’s own.
Obviously, he must train her and help realise her destiny as the boxer who resurrects the sport and provides hope to aspiring female boxers across the country.
It's all very Chak De!-esque territory, which is very good company to be in, and this might lull you into a false sense of security, ready to cheer on Adi's underdog. But you don't get the chance to.
The film doesn’t allow its lead characters to develop enough to garner empathy.
Their default setting is anger – after a while you’ll just want to cover your ears due to all the yelling. The film, which is about boxing, devotes very little screen time to the nuances of the sport.
For all the soap-opera hysterics, the movie does have its moments, mostly in the second half. The sibling rivalry between Madhi and Lux (Mumtaz Sorcar), their good-for-nothing father stealing cable TV to watch the championship match, Madhi’s inevitable infatuation with Adi, and the depth of the corruption in the association, perpetuated by its sleaze-ball head, Dev, are all welcome breaks in an otherwise dreary screenplay. It is pulled down further by stale, repetitive dialogue.
Hussain, as a creepy association head who routinely harasses women on the team, delivers a stellar performance.
Simultaneously shot in Hindi and Tamil, Saala Khadoos attempted big things but fails to deliver on almost all of them.
For a movie whose director struggled for almost six years to make, it is ironic that it switches between being over the top and glib about its own characters’ very believable dilemmas.
The lead pair had excellent templates to draw from – Naseeruddin Shah's cynicism from the 2005 sleeper hit Iqbal, Shah Rukh Khan's unflinching determination from Chak De!, and Priyanka Chopra's many brushes with corruption and the anger that fuels her in Mary Kom – but they're too busy over-emoting to notice.
