Cast:Tiger Shroff, Shraddha Kapoor, Sudheer Babu

Direction: Sabbir Khan

Produced: SajidNadiadwala

Written: SanjeevDutta

Genre: Action

Duration:133 Mins*

The trailer probably convinced you that the film was a conceptual marriage of The Karate Kid and The Raid. It may not have hinted at the clear-cut remake of Varsham that it is. Who needs screenplay when you have 2004's Telugu film to lean on?

Much of the first half follows the screenplay checkbox of the original. Heroine abduction? Check. Seething hero agrees to save her to get surgery money for loved one (a track eventually forgotten)? Check. Heroine's father stupidly messes up a love story only to invoke it when the daughter is kidnapped? Check.

12 years later, the recycled courtship between Siya (ShraddhaKapoor) and Ronny (Tiger Shroff) in Baaghi serves to irritate, regardless of whether you have seen Varsham or similar thematic offshoots. Siya talks to clouds, likes rain. That would read weirdly on her Tinder profile but does not deter aimless Romeo Ronny from flashing a grin and blowing kisses at her. This is only their first meeting inside a train, followed by a rain dance at the platform soon after.

Khurana (Sunil Grover), Siya's gambler father manages to throw a spanner in the moronic workings of their romance. He is essentially there to profit off his daughter, even if it means forcing her to become an actress in Telugu films in later scenes. Who knew it would be so easy? Ronny, meanwhile, has been sent to Kerala to the ashram of Guru swamy (Shifuji Shaurya Bhardwaj) by his late father to learn a thing or two about being responsible (and also to acquire some Kalaripa yattu skills). Guru swamy seems grim at the news of his friend's passing but Ronny seems cool with losing a parent. The father is never spoken of again. But it is a small flaw over everything else that goes wrong in the story (other than taking major sequences/plot elements from Varsham).

For instance, enter the villain Raghav Shetty (Sudheer Babu Posani), who is the allegorical Raavan and a Kalaripayattu rival to Ronny. He keeps turning up to shake the lovers' paradise when they are not bursting into song. The martial arts training disappears soon after, in favour of the disjointed love story, pouty posturing and inane comedy. Possibly the most embarrassing instance of the lattermost is having Sanjay Mishra play a blind cabbie in Bangkok, who ends up scrubbing a local lady's thighs, thinking them to be a part of his car. Racist accents and comments abound in this gag too.

The rest of the film is a blur of Tiger Shroff impressively but repetitively kicking faces with his roundhouse swings. Baaghi tries to be a love story with a mentor-student plot but fails on both counts. If the film progressed in the manner it was edited in the trailer, with the same story sequence, it would have been a better film. You do not get the martial arts promised. The best bits are in the trailer. Everything else is all talk, song and villainy. The hero may be a touted rebel (at least Tiger Shroff is likeable) but the writers could have tried to exploit his athletic prowess better with a fresher story. That is where the true rebellion ought to have begun.