Once upon a time, Ram Gopal Varma made seminal films. From ‘Shiva’ to ‘Rangeela’ to ‘Satya’ to ‘Sarkar’, his films were something radically different from what bollywood would otherwise produce. But since the latter half of the last decade, his output has increasingly become bad, sometimes even unwatchable. And with this in mind, he has returned to arguably his most important film ‘Satya’ to produce a sequel.
The trailer for ‘Satya 2’ starts off with text on screen against images of various Mumbai landmarks. This text informs us that as long as greed exists in society, the underworld will never die. We then see a young person make his way to Mumbai wanting to build an underworld company. After all, he’s coming to “reinvent the underworld” as Ram Gopal Varma has said.
This character then goes on to narrate (monotonously) how the dons who came before him committed silly mistakes and how he would see to it that he doesn’t do the same. But as the trailer later shows, no one knows a thing about this mysterious person. (We even see his silhouette walking along Marine Drive.)
To answer the call of a character asking the gangster about his background, we are shown the woman in the gangster’s life. The gangster used to spend a lot of time with his woman, looking at them dancing or talking about poetry. The character then charts out his plan of killing three of India’s most influential people.
Like all great underworld characters throughout cinema history, our character Satya even gets a parting line. “Taaqat ke asli power, usko chupane rakne mein hai.”
The mysterious gangster played by Puneet Singh Ratn is a monotonous character, and it does not help that the newcomer says his dialogues with the same forlorn expression throughout. This film looks like it features less of Ram Gopal Varma’s now trademark weird camera angles (though we did notice some, for example, the low angle as the car tyre approaches the camera).
All in all, this film looks like another RGV one we can easily avoid. Such trailers only make us wonder more: where is the Ram Gopal Varma of yore?
Bonus: Look out for the woolly mammoth in the trailer.
Ram Gopal Varma’s ‘Satya 2’ has a tentative August release.
