Epic Cop-Out: The Flawed Heroism of Rohit Shetty’s Singham Again

Published : Nov 11, 2024 22:42 IST - 6 MINS READ The rot at the heart of Rohit Shetty’s Singham Again is not what you think it is. Singham’s wife is taken to Sri Lanka, which requires Singham to become Rama, find his Lakshman in the Kalaripayattu-flexed Satya, his Hanuman in Simmba, Garuda in Sooryavanshi, and a dangling Lady Singham, left without a Ramayana parallel because you can never have too many devotees and also because this is how the film builds on the epic text—not by playing with it, but by heaping a story already burdened with squelching faith with even more of it. “To glorify the police, as Singham Again does, by using the same things that make them broken—unchecked violence—is to see the police not as broken but as fundamentally okay. So, by making Singham a police officer, such films do not elevate the police force so much as concede that the police need a hero to succeed. In his essay titled “My Generation: Anthem for a forgotten cohort”, Professor Justin E.H. Smith complicates this by saying: “To identify some work of art, literature, or entertainment as problematic is… simply to taint public perception, to inform readers or viewers that enjoyment of the work in question will likely result in some sort of subtle social sanctioning.