Suresh Triveni’s Subedaar is an odd film. The Amazon Prime Video film, starring Anil Kapoor, wants to be mass in the streets and class in the sheets. The result is a curious, uneven ride. You can see the vision behind Suresh’s film: to subvert, toy with, and use the packaging and trappings of masala action cinema to examine something more raw and primal. But the result risks being neither here nor there, an action drama that struggles to thrill nor mount a moody character study.
Subedaar Arjun Maurya (a fierce Anil Kapoor) is a retired army officer who’s recently returned home to an unnamed North Indian town. Arjun is the gruff rebel desperately in search of a cause. The recent passing of his wife (Khushbu Sundar) forces Arjun into retirement after 25 years in the Army. It also forces him to find his footing with Shyama, the daughter he was barely around for (a solid Radhika Madan).
Struggling to readjust to the rhythms of domestic life while reeling from grief, aside from his inner demons, Arjun must face two external ones. The first is all around him. The officer who’s seen a lifetime of battlefields and borders faces his latest foe—bureaucracy. A life of order, structure, and clearly defined power structures is flung into the chaos of corruption, inefficiency, and apathy in everyday India.
I liked the textures that Suresh and his DOP, Ayan Saxena, bring to the sights and sounds of the daily grind in the initial stretch of the film. You can see Arjun’s ticking-time-bomb presence barely keeping it together amidst the indifferent bank tellers, overwhelming traffic, and persistent disorder around every corner. He’s even laughed at by police officers for stopping at traffic lights.
