Film Review: 'Red Alert' has zero impact

Red Alert: The war within
Cast: Suniel Shetty, Vinod Khanna, Naseeruddin Shah, Gulshan Grover, Sameera Reddy, Seema Biswas, Ayesha Dharker, Bhagyashree, Ashish Vidhyarthi, Makarand Deshpande
Director: Anant Narayan  Mahadevan
Rating: * * *

Anant Mahadadevan appears to have expanded his horizons. The maker of innocuous formulaic fare(Anamika) has taken a leap of faith and made a brave little film based on  the naxal menace that has escalated alarmingly in our country.

It’s a topical film , though much delayed, as it comes at a time when the country is still debating on a credible policy to curb the violence that has attained intolerable limits.

Maoist rebels killed 26 police officers in a bloody jungle ambush just last month and a few months prior to that a similar
assault left 76 policemen dead. Again insurgency was blamed for the derailment of a passenger train from Kolkata to Mumbai where 150 people were killed. Mahadevan’s venture therefore has great resonance even if it fails to give you any viable answers.

The script by Aruna Raje encapsulates a true story (that’s the claim anyway) and Mahadevan’s narrative captures it quite faithfully. But the effect is not as yielding as it could have been. Action hero Sunil Shetty dons the get-up of an impoverished farmer Narsimha, who wants to provide for his family-a wife(Bhagyashree) and two children, but finds the going too tough. So he moonlights as a cook for a naxal group hiding in the forest, gets caught in an ambush engineered by Inspector Rathore(Gulshan Grover) and his band of sharp shooting policemen, escapes, only to be forced into following the groups’ violent ideology.

The film has a realistic tone, there are no bollywoodian excesses to crib about and the performances by almost all the cast members are sincere and entreatingly real. The lack of dramatic fervor and an excessively weak central character makes it  bleed, though. Narsimha is an innocent caught up in the vortex of violence.  He has a family duty that he is well aware of and eager to fulfill- yet he is portrayed as naïve and unwitting.

Shetty’s Narsimha is neither a sympathizer nor an opponent, yet he carries food for the naxals which would in fact make him culpable as an abettor. This is in fact a kind of portrayal engineered by people who have little knowledge of the intrinsic workings of the rural Indian mind.

It’s a stereotype that weakens the overall effect of the narrative. Narsimha’s actions throughout the film therefore stand out like a sore thumb. His being co-opted into the naxal gang also doesn’t pass muster as he would in all probability be the most likely to cry wolf, given the first chance. One would think (that in real life), the naxals couldn’t possibly have attained front page status by making such foolish choices and Mahadevan and Raje should therefore have done a deeper study before penning the character.

Their  effort at stark realism though a bit unhinged, appears quite gratifying. The edits are crisp, the tone is well-defined by hand-held camerawork and the narration appears fluid.

The mood is not clearly defined though. As a viewer you can well appreciate the technique but you never feel it’s impact. The twist towards the end also appears to be forced and terribly unconvincing. This is not a film that will ignite minds nor will it create a viable forum for debate.

From this work we never get to know where  Mahadevan’s true sympathies lie. The film is just too self-conscious and wary for that!