Kesari Chapter 2, Paddington in Peru: Reviews This Week

Kesari Chapter 2: Akshay Kumar Hijacks Jallianwala Bagh Tragedy

Kesari Chapter 2 is a revival of old-school politics where the antagonism against the British, the original outsider, confirms the communal unity of India. Ishita Sengupta reviews.

Dir: Karan Singh Tyagi

Cast: Akshay Kumar, R Madhavan, Ananya Panday

Playing in: Theatres

KARAN SINGH TYAGI ’s Kesari Chapter 2: The Untold Story of Jallianwala Bagh is based on a book that is based on a 1924 defamation case filed by a former British Lieutenant Governor of Punjab against an Indian lawyer. The film, however, unfolds as a series of court proceedings that purports that the Indian lawyer had sued the Crown. This flip in premise is slight but definite, pointing to Hindi films’ increasing tendency of revisiting the past only to champion a hero, even at the cost of altering it.

Kesari Chapter 2 , the spiritual sequel to Anurag Singh’s Kesari (2019), deals with the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre where over 1000 people were shot dead at a peaceful gathering in Amritsar by the British military officer Reginald Dyer. Although this forms the centerpiece, the film concerns itself with the premeditated way the British assembled the crowd on April 13, and conveys it through speculative rendering of a court case.

This can be a deviation from facts but not fiction. Earlier this year Ram Madhvani had done something similar in The Waking of a Nation , a bloated historical series that focussed on the conspiracy hatched by the British to kill Indians on that specific day. Kesari Chapter 2 follows a similar arc and while Madhvani alluded to the fictional undertones by using fictitious names, Tyagi’s film doubles down on its authenticity by resorting to no such shield. Therefore, Justice Chettoor Sankaran Nair (played by Akshay Kumar , of course), the real-life celebrated barrister who had accused Michael O’Dwyer at the time of the massacre and was thus taken to court, holds General Dyer accountable in court in the retelling for murdering innocent people. He is helped by co-council Dilreet Gill (Ananya Panday) and challenged by British advocate Neville McKinley (R. Madhavan). And through the runtime of the case, familiar details of the Jallianwala Bagh emerge, a lot of which is available on Wikipedia.

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Paddington In Peru: Too Much Padding, Not A Ton Of Fun

8 years after the last film, Paddington Brown now feels like mid-tier fare. In this world of hate-watching and hate politics and general hatred, the newest adventure is simply not adventurous enough, writes Rahul Desai .

Dir: Dougal Wilson

Cast: Ben Whinshaw, Hugh Bonneville, Emily Mortimer, Julie Walters, Olivia Colman, Antonio Banderas

Playing in: Theatres

THE BEST MOMENT of Paddington in Peru — the third instalment in the live-action animated film franchise about a polite bear who finds a home with a British family in London — features the villain from Paddington 2 . The inimitable Hugh Grant reappears as ‘master of disguise’ Phoenix Buchanan. But one must wait patiently for 106 minutes to reach this mid-credits sequence. That’s not to say Paddington in Peru is a vintage bore. It just tries too hard not to be one.

It’s serviceable and sweet and aggressively family-friendly, but its biggest hybrid-medium competition is its own legacy. The first two parts raised the bar so high for a landscape morphing into a Disney wasteland of remakes that the only way to process Paddington in Peru (code name: Pip, incidentally the protagonist of Great Expectations , which this film dashes) is to admit that it lacks the novelty of Paddington (2014) and the ingenuity of Paddington 2 (2017). There’s no easy way to say it: 8 years after the last film, the bear now feels like mid-tier fare. In this world of hate-watching and hate politics and general hatred, the newest adventure of Paddington Brown — an all-ages-accessible and orange-marmalade-loving allegory against modern-day xenophobia and fascist immigrant policies — is simply not adventurous enough.

Paddington has settled in as the most different-looking member of the very white Brown Family. The human community has made the hairy bear one of their own — the film even opens with him receiving his British passport. He is a legal citizen. They soon receive a worrying letter from the Reverend Mother (Olivia Colman) running the Home of Retired Bears in Peru, where Paddington’s old Aunt Lucy resides. Naturally, this results in the franchise leaving London on what eventually looks more like an overplanned office picnic than an exotic family vacation. The Brown family reach Peru to discover that Aunt Lucy has gone missing in the jungle. Paddington’s search for his aunt is inevitably hijacked by an Amazonian quest for ancient gold and a lost city with two local stakeholders — a riverboat captain with “gold sickness” named Hunter (Antonio Banderas), and the suspiciously cheery Reverend Mother — joining in.

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