Deva and Vardha’s friendship sparks Neel’s crazy story, uniting flashbacks with childhood climatic traumas – they were so close and only ten years old, it was 1985! – with a perpetual escalation of “Game of Thrones”-style feuds between warring Khansarian leaders. . Will Deva bring peace to Khansaar and reunite with Vardha? No of course not. It’s the story of two childhood best friends who became the kind of rivals whose hatred is so intense that it makes their story too “scary to think about,” according to overripe voiceover narration. Well Named. This line is particularly funny given that it’s said just before the supertitle card (“PART 1: CEASEFIRE”) announces an intermission break.
“Would you like to know his story?” » says the narrator about halfway through the film. “Son” obviously means Deva, but it could just as easily mean Neel, who plays every move on screen as if it were a major dramatic event. Neel tends to supercharge the action with slow motion, a reverb-heavy score, and sound effects to match. It also favors Zack Snyder’s fast-paced build-up to his fight scenes, alternately pacing and slowing down set pieces so that they’re more about poses than choreography.
There’s no doubt that Neel is the key to “Salaar’s” success, so it’s hard to get too upset about him being reminded with every italicized, bolded, underlined flourish. This film, like his last two films, feels like a calculated attempt to synthesize a few different trends into the next mega-trend, including the pan-Indian appeal of co-stars Prabhas (Telugu language) and Sukumaran (Malayalam). Neel retraces his steps with bolder, harsher accents, as when a group of women sing and shake their anklets in unison to thank Deva for delivering them from a tyrannical Lord and his rapist son.
Neel has become a more refined filmmaker since “Ugramm” and has used what he’s learned to delve deeper into a style he’s clearly been thinking about for a while now. It shows, even though “Salaar” is just another teenage fantasy about a righteous savior and a world-ending civil war, which will arrive soon enough in “Salaar: Part 2.”
In the cinema now.
