Fateh

Fateh Movie Review Rating:

Star Cast: Sonu Sood, Jacqueline Fernandez, Naseeruddin Shah, Vijay Raaz, Shiv Jyoti Rajput

Director: Sonu Sood

What’s Good: Maybe, to a point, Jacqueline Fernandez in all the male overdrive!

What’s Bad: The sickening, ultra-gratuitous violence, and almost everything else.

Loo Break: Take your pick through the 130 minutes. At the most, you will miss a few stabs and shots!

Watch or Not?: I did, sadly! We critics have to do our duty!

Language: Hindi

Available On: Theatrical Release

Runtime: 130 Minutes

User Rating:

The story begins in a Punjab pind (village) where Fateh Singh (Sonu Sood) is the local darling and is compelled to look for Nimrit Kaur (Shiv Jyoti Rajput), who runs a mobile shop. She unintendedly becomes a stool pigeon who entices her fellow villagers to become victims in a cyber racket. When a fellow villager commits suicide after his loss, she is stricken by conscience and decides to look for the perpetrators whom she has abetted without realizing the consequences.

When Nimrit disappears, Fateh, who we come to know is an ex-special ops officer with a kind of professional past that is not exactly bright, goes in search of her. He soon unravels a nationwide web of cybercrime and goes on an annihilation drive. He is helped by Khushi (Jacqueline Fernandez), the leader of a group of ethical hackers. Needless to say, he almost dies. And even more needless, the optimistic writer-director-actor even hints at a sequel like so many films do. Shudder and shivers unlimited!

Fateh Movie Review: Script Analysis

Hacking has multiple connotations as a word, and while the criminals shown are hacking accounts of victims around the country to incredible lengths, our hero decides to hack the criminals on the neck, in the eyes, cheeks, face, torso, legs, arms, hands, groin (!) and everywhere else. Knives and assorted tools apart, he bludgeons them with rods or whatever objects he can lay on, smashes heads, pins the baddies to walls or tables, and when he has firearms (never mind how he obtains them) shoots them as if he is swatting flies in a crowded trash can. There is a spree of murders in a hacker’s residence, and we are not even told (naturally!) how the bodies are disposed of!!

The script is thus nothing but a non-stop shower of violence that the credit titles term “disturbing” but is sickening beyond description. The “story” (Sonu Sood) claims that cybercrime can be executed to the extent that millions of people can be robbed. Their bank accounts are hacked (that word again!) and looted very easily, and the rich, poor, and in-between’s futures can be ruined by a caucus of criminals, who seem to rule even TV networks as they can easily penetrate them! Equally conveniently, noble people can hack into their schemes as well.

In short, any intelligent thought that is sans exaggeration is a no-no for the writers (script again by Sonu Sood with someone called Ankur Pajni), who just decide to interpolate a few scenes of sentiment (in the Punjab pind), romance, and foreign locations (America, Dubai) to fill in the vacuum amidst the grotesque quantum of the kind of nauseating violence we happen to recognize as Anurag Kashyap and cohorts’ cinema.

Fateh Movie Review: Star Performance

As said before, there is no scope for performance here, least of all from the men. Naseeruddin Shah is kingpin Reza, sleepwalking with monotones even in the last frame, where he knows he will die. Vijay Raaz is Satyaprakash, whose digital password is ‘Satyameva Jayate’ (laugh, all of you), and shockingly, the ever-dependable Dibyendu Bhattacharya is superficial as a renegade cop. Sonu Sood merely grimaces and occasionally has a hint of a smile.

The ladies have scarce work, but Jacqueline makes for the only bright spot in the film as Khushi. Shiv Jyoti Rajput’s performance as Nimrit is ho-hum, and Krushna Patil’s performance as Dolly is wasted.