Rating : ⭐️⭐️1/2
Genre: Mystery
Year: 2022
Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes
Director: Raj Singh Chaudhary
Cast: Anil Kapoor, Satish Kaushik, Harshvardhan Kapoor, Fatima Sana Sheikh
Kid rating: PG-17
Anil Kapoor stars as Police Inspector Surekha Singh, head of a police station in Munabao village, India along the Into-Pakistan border. When a dead body is found hanging from a tree, Singh is spurred into action by the unusual incident in this sleepy village. Is the grisly death due to a local squabble or is it the work of an outsider?
There is a newbie in town – antiques dealer Siddharth Kumar (Harshvardhan Kapoor). Then there is the opium smuggler from across the border Hanif Khan (Rahul Singh). Surekha Singh questions the antiques dealer, but the smuggler wages a surreptitious battle and is hard to get hold of. Halfway through the film, we, the viewers are privy to the identity of the murderer so the second half of the film is watching Surekha Singh figure this out.
Thar could have been a gritty mystery thriller but fails to impress. The locales are realistic, but the same can’t be said of the characters. The characters are flat; we are barely even are invested in Surekha’s quest for justice. It’s not that his character isn’t vulnerable; Surekha Singh is close to retirement, hasn’t had a great career because as he puts it, his focus has been only on staying alive. A wizened old on-the-verge-of-retirement police officer mired in the unforgiving heat of the desert, tied to a thankless job, sans any excitement or career prospects – one wants to empathize with that, doesn’t one? I still couldn’t. That’s a pity. And quite a fatal flaw in the film.
Anil Kapoor, with his snazzy shades, still looks urban and not rustic enough for a remote police thana in the Rajasthan desert. Harshvardhan isn’t quite the actor his father is; his expressions are wooden throughout the movie. Satish Kaushik (whom I last saw in Udta Punjab) as Sub Inspector Bhura was quite believable and fit the role. Fatima Sana Sheikh does well with the little material she’s given; her character and the allusions to domestic violence and repression of females in the hinterland are ultimately wasted.
Thar gets pretty gruesome as we witness the perpetrator torturing his victims. And the whole torture thing took up way too much time and space in this film, time the director could have used instead to build an emotional connect to the story. The film has plot points which don’t add to the story or flesh out any more details, so the film feels untethered and not very cohesive. Thar’s locales – the brutal, unforgiving desert gives it a starkness, an intensity and a grittiness. Unfortunately, just great locales do not a good film make.
In summary, Thar is a one-time watch. Don’t watch it with any great expectations and you won’t be disappointed.
Kidwise: Scenes showing gruesome violence/torture.
