Bollywood’s new generation martial arts action hero, Tiger Shroff, goes the superhero route in this film that starts out quite funny before things get real.
Malhotra, an unscrupulous businessman, has been transporting toxic waste to a local facility near a lake. However, to speed delivery up, he intends to build a bridge but there stands one thing in his way. That is a 200-year old tree where the locals pray upon a symbol of the Sikh religion. The owner of the tree, Mrs. Dhillon, refuses to give up the land. Her son, Aman, is a martial arts teacher at a local school who doesn’t get the respect he deserves as a teacher and his mother berates him for not being like his late father. However, that is all about to change.
When Malhotra sends in foreign mercenary Raaka to destroy the tree, Aman attempts to stop him. Brutally beaten and nearly impaled on the tree, a lightning storm causes both Aman and Raaka to be struck. Raaka ends up in Malhotra’s toxic waste facility, but Aman awakens the next day as if nothing has happened. He soon learns he has been given superpowers. Learning to harness his new powers, Aman becomes the Flying Jatt, a local superhero. However, Raaka also awakens and lives off pollution. Things soon become serious when tragedy strikes the young hero, who decides that to stop Raaka, he must do the impossible.
Actor and martial artist Tiger Shroff proved himself to be a bankable lead with his film debut Heropanti and the 2006 action thriller Baaghi, which despite its controversial climax, proved that lightning struck twice. Shroff now tackles the superhero film and well, it didn’t do as well as his first two films. However, where some sequels to Spider-Man and The Amazing Spider-Man suffered from too many characters, the film’s topics of both religion and the environment tend to be a little much.
However, Shroff is the film’s saving grace as he truly goes from zero to hero and in such an ironic twist, Shroff’s character is a martial arts teacher before going into superhero mode. The first half of the film, which involves his character Aman’s transition to harnessing his super powers is quite funny. Having to cope with his newfound powers, Aman gets the full support of his brother and mother, the latter a Sikh fanatic who wants Aman to be like his father, a legendary warrior. It is when the end of the second act and start of the third act where things get real and Aman, in full use of his powers, decide to become a true hero.
While Jacqueline Fernandez’s Kirti is the object of Shroff’s affections and is the focus of the Bollywood musical sequences, it becomes somewhat more of a backseat to the classic hero vs. villain tale and in this case, the villain is Raaka, played by Australian powerhouse Nathan Jones. His introductory scene, set in a desert, brings a taste of the brutality Jones can pull off. However, when he is given superpowers which are enhanced due to pollution, he becomes more brutal to a point where he not proves to be superior to our hero, who causes a major tragedy in the hero’s life and thus, fully transitions Aman into his destiny as the Flying Jatt.
A Flying Jatt is not a bad superhero action-comedy. While the film’s combination of religion and the environment tends to be a little too much, that doesn’t ultimately stop the film from being completely bad as Tiger Shroff’s the saving grace as a true “zero to hero” type of character.
WFG RATING: B-
A Balaji Motion Pictures production. Director: Remo D’Souza. Producers: Aman Gill, Ekta Kapoor, Shobha Kapoor, and Sameer Nair. Writers: Remo D’Souza and Tushar Hiranandani. Cinematography: Vijay Kumar Arora. Editing: Nitin FCP.
Cast: Tiger Shroff, Jacqueline Fernandez, Nathan Jones, Kay Kay Menon, Amrita Singh, Gaurav Pandey, Mukesh Hariawala, Shraddha Kapoor, Amrita Puri.
WorldFilmGeek 