Jai Gangaajal: Prakash Jha with favourite subject

Cast: Priyanka Chopra, Prakash Jha, Manav Kaul, Rahul Bhat, Murli Sharma
Rated: 7/10
Prakash Jha is back — and with his favourite subject, with himself on the screen for the first time and a title that relives his peak of glory with Gangaajal and Ajay Devgn.
In a way, it is similar — police-public relationship, the politico-criminal nexus and the badlands of Bihar. Only, this time, it is not the cops who have gone berserk but the public. From the Bhagalpur blindings which Jha took up in Gangaajal, to Jai Gangaajal where the police is convulsing under the weight of its ruthless political masters, nothing really has changed with the police force. It was functioning in extreme stress back then and it is doing the same now. Jha, with this one, merely chronicles the change for worse, the frustration of the men in uniform, the inherent corruption, the deceit and the treachery and everything else that pleads for emergent police reforms.
As a chronicler, as a story teller, Jha is brilliant but the end that he portrays leaves it all hanging mid air thereby stressing his stand against taking a stand. He tells his story through a woman IPS officer played to the hilt by a real to life Priyanka Chopra. Her crackling chemistry with her uniform, her portrayal of the frustration of being in the middle of a war of nerves, straddled with a corrupt DSP and an incompetent police force on one side and a maniacal MLA kin on a raping, killing spree and an enraged band of activists making Bankepur a war zone, she has worked hard to keep it real, to the point and believable. As an actor, she has grown and if Devgn was the centre point in Gangaajal with his controlled histrionics, she holds it together in Jai Gangaajal even though the camera is overindulgent with Jha and his debut as a man in uniform. As an actor, Jha sports a swagger that’s too urbane for a Bankepur DSP.
Playing a DSP straddling corruption and oiling the system with a quiet display of uncatchable deceit, he blackmails the poor villagers with aplomb to get things done for the MLA. His transformation from a bad to a good policeman happens without much of a provocation and is thus unexplained.
The film is a statement on the needs of the police force and their compulsions. In a way it explains the corruption too. One feels it could have been more stark had it not been so open-ended in conclusion.
A holding movie nevertheless. 
Source: Sunday Pioneer, 6 March, 2016

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