Anand Prakash

I honestly loved the trailer and was eagerly hoping for this movie to turn out to be a good one. Most of the reviewers out there are bashing "Laal Kaptaan" to dirt for its slow story telling, not so enormous ending etc. Incidentally I also stumbled across a few user reviews praising the Movie and comparing it with cults like "No country for old men", "Hateful eight" etc. and thanks to those reviewers that i did. I went to the theater with low expectations. The gory cinematography and the gritty characterizations in the backdrop of the historical Battle of Buxar, that forever changed the course of Indian History, itself is a premise big enough for an epic cinema !! Saif Ali Khan is a ferocious Naga Sadhu seeking "mukti" (Salvation) through revenge and Deepak Dobriyal is a tracker with an acute sense of smell. Both the characters are very well written and equally well played, In fact this is true for all the major characters, each of them driven by their own set of motivations, history and personality. In the times of Netflix and Amazon Prime, when we have the entirety of world cinema on our mobile devices, its very easy to get distracted if a character makes some decision which is sudden or abrupt and is not aligned to his/her/zer characterization or the motivation is not justified enough. In the case of Laal Kaptaan, never in the entire movie did I ever doubt their decisions or question the turn of events. In Some scenes the accents were indeed thick and sub titles would have been helpful but that is where my list of complaints against this movie starts and end !! I have no qualms with the background score either, it didn't feel overdone and was just the amount that was needed. No matter how badly this movie does at the box office now, few years down the line "Laal Kaptaan" is going to go down a cult classic ( Remember Amitabh Bachhan's Agneepath ?).