What happened to the dream?: Deepanjana Pal on Bollywood’s fantasy factory

Last week, the Hindi film industry delivered two of its shiniest offerings of the year: Bhool Bhulaiyaa 3 and Singham Again.

It was a box-office face-off that had trade analysts and fans buzzing. Asked if this could be called “the Indian Barbenheimer”, I just about managed to answer “Not quite”, before my brain melted at the thought of Anees Bazmee being our Greta Gerwig and Rohit Shetty, our Christopher Nolan.

Their box-office successes aside, last year’s Barbie and Oppenheimer stood out as unprecedented for the creative decisions taken by their directors. They were both bold, novel attempts to tell a somewhat-familiar story in a stunning new way.
Bhool Bhulaiyaa 3 and Singham Again, in contrast, take pride in their lack of originality. Irrespective of how much they earn at the box office, the two films are emblematic of a critical problem within Bollywood: a crisis of the imagination.
Popular Hindi cinema has a long tradition of being “inspired by” others (and itself), but alongside the formulaic was a strain of inventiveness and ambition. One of the charms of the genre affectionately known as Bollywood was that it spun fantasies that rivalled what Hollywood served up, but at a fraction of the cost.
Mainstream Hindi movies were the stuff of pan-Indian dreams because of the way they reimagined our world. Great care went into even the most formulaic dream sequences; the aim was to transport, enthral, enchant. Stories were so emotive that they became lore; and as lore, one didn’t mind revisiting them, in slightly different avatars, over and over.
Singham Again is rumoured to have cost over ₹300 crore; Bhool Bhulaiyaa 3, about ₹150 crore. Yet what we see on screen is garish production design, flat cinematography, crude CGI and choppy editing. Both films suffer from a simple lack of ambition, attention to detail, and effort.
BB3 does edge ahead of Singham Again a bit, because of the twist in its final act, and the sweep of its broad humour. Yet here is a film that would rather use a wind machine and auto-tune than let Vidya Balan act. It casts the breakout star of Bulbbul (2020), Tripti Dimri, in a role that requires her to do little more than place her hourglass figure on display in low-slung saris.
Speaking of wasted talent, imagine coming up with choreography that even Madhuri Dixit cannot bring to life, and writing a role that remains forgettable — even with Vijay Raaz performing the part.
Shetty’s latest, meanwhile, isn’t so much a film as a pastiche of right-wing propaganda, dad jokes and action sequences that play out largely in slow-motion.
Despite a team of nine writers (not including Valmiki, who perhaps deserved a mention, since his Ramayana takes up much of the film’s runtime), Singham Again has a wafer-thin plot. True, no one watches a Rohit Shetty Picturez production for the story. His fans are hoping he will blow their minds with explosions, flying fists and airborne cars.
While multiple vehicles dutifully flip and catch fire, the stunts and action choreography are unimaginative. In more than one fistfight, the climactic move is to repeatedly slap the bad guys.
Is this really the best that Hindi cinema can do in 2024?
(To reach Deepanjana Pal with feedback, write to @dpanjana on Instagram)