Jer-zzz...

This, one can surmise from recent back-to-back national bestsellers RRR (2022) and Pushpa (2021) in Telugu — with Hyderabad heroes NTR Jr, Ram Charan, Allu Arjun killing it on centre-stage in the super-hit Hindi dubs as well

Jersey
U/A: Sports drama
Dir: Gowtam Tinnanuri
Cast: Shahid Kapoor, Mrunal Thakur
Rating: **

This is actor Shahid Kapoor’s first theatrical release since the stunning sleeper success, Kabir Singh (2019). Which, in turn, I guess, would’ve done just as well in its original form as Arjun Reddy (2017) — with the great soundtrack, and Vijay Deverakonda in the lead.  This, one can surmise from recent back-to-back national bestsellers RRR (2022) and Pushpa (2021) in Telugu — with Hyderabad heroes NTR Jr, Ram Charan, Allu Arjun killing it on centre-stage in the super-hit Hindi dubs as well.

Jersey is Hindi remake of the 2019 Telugu film of the same name, with the director (Gowtam Tinnanuri) retained from the original; as with Sandeep Reddy Vanga for Kabir Singh/Arjun Reddy. Kapoor — the North Indian star brought in, instead of Nani in Telugu — plays a character called Arjun.  The first apprehension for an audience (like me) over a movie directly transplanted from mainstream Telugu is if it’ll hit the usual, vertigo-inducing, blockbuster-level high notes. 

It doesn’t, quite. In fact it’s rather quiet and realistic in here — more flower than cut-to-cut fire. Much as you’ve begun to expect from new-age Bollywood in general. Is that necessarily a good thing? Let’s see.  Also in line with a tiring trend across Bollywood, this is a ‘sports film’ — meaning the story of the victory of the underdog, navigating multiple obstacles on and off the playfield, before the lead character/s makes it, and you head home, wholly inspired. The last big Hindi theatrical release, 83 (2021), was a cricket drama. So is this. 

Cricket apart, of course 83 and Jersey are totally different. Given the former was as faithful an account possible of India’s 1983 World Cup campaign, while this is a made-up story of a superstar batsman of first-class cricket from the mid ’80s, who had his career abruptly shortened.  I see late cricketer Raman Lamba as suggested inspiration — floating around on the Internet. You sense no such major similarities on screen. Unlike how people saw Nagesh Kukunoor’s fictional Iqbal (2005) as being somewhat based on cricketer Munaf Patel. The idea here is to entirely imagine a myth/legend instead.

Here’s the thing with Jersey though, that you might find in common with other cricket (or sports) movies — the filmmakers over-estimating the audience’s related capacity to watch a fake cricket match on the giant screen, just because they can sit through hours of the real stuff on TV. This is least of the audience’s worries still.  To be fair, the cricketing portions are competently shot. Kapoor, in the middle, gets his batting technique/shots spot-on (so far as I can tell). No doubt he also arouses strong goals in the looks/fitness department — playing a character gracefully ageing over a decade. 

Kapoor’s core fan-base — I hear they call themselves Shanatics — will be sufficiently pleased. If memory serves me right, the last time he starred in a full-length cricket film, it was the dum-dum Dil Bole Hadippa (2009). This is infinitely superior.  The jersey in Jersey is what cine-enthusiasts might call a MacGuffin — an object that’s merely a trigger for a plot, lending no greater meaning to it otherwise. 

The hero’s little son wants an India team jersey that, in the mid ’90s costs Rs 500, which is an astoundingly huge sum. The father is jobless. His cricketing days are prematurely behind him. The boy’s jersey sort of sets the ball rolling, if you may.  Mrunal Thakur plays the wife of the sporting talent returning to the ring. It’s a role reproduced from only nine months ago, when she was cast as the patient woman behind the aged boxer-husband (Farhan Akhtar) in the sports flick Toofaan (2021). 

Jersey then is essentially about Kapoor, 41, as the lead character making a comeback to domestic cricket, or its pinnacle, the Ranji Trophy, at 36 — when a spot in the coaching staff is more easily available to him.  The stakes are personal. His first big break is a local charity match against an international side. Here’s the (missed) catch. This possibly exhilarating part of an oldish bloke  up against all kinda odds, which is the actual film, kicks in so late, i.e. when the movie has gone on forever, and yet all over the place — you wonder what you’d been sitting in the theatre all along for.

Sure, you get the point; courage, ageism ’n all. Which is predictable enough for you to know how everything will play out anyway. But the picture is on such a flat pitch — hardly a moving high to appreciate a debilitating low, no major turns, or indeed any pace at all — that at 174 minutes of a sarson da saga set in Chandigarh, one can only hope for a suitable editor to reconfigure/tighten this script.  Ideally knock it by half, to end up with something twice as good. Well, too late for that. With Jersey, you can catch some z’s instead then. 

*YUCK  **WHATEVER  ***GOOD  ****SUPER  *****AWESOME

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