Director Vasan Bala has a knack for capturing the way some humans view others as disposable, as lives to spend for power. In Bala’s new Hindi-language production Jigra, a jailbreak film that frequently alludes to earlier, better Bollywood thrillers, Satya (a luminous Alia Bhatt), has learned from the best; after witnessing her father’s suicide she is raised by powerful relatives, and works as a fixer in one of their luxury hotels where she handles any inconveniences, human or otherwise.
Satya’s sole loyalty is to her younger, less savvy brother Ankur (Vedang Raina); whose attempts to raise money for a tech start-up with his reckless, far richer cousin Kabir (Aditya Nanda) go from bacchanalia to drug bust. Kabir and his family summarily frame Ankur; he is sentenced to sentenced to death by electrocution in Hanshi Dao, a fictional East Asian island nation inspired by Malaysia and Singapore’s draconian drug policies.
As in Gumrah, a 1993 Hindi-language thriller directed by Bhatt’s father Mahesh, Jigra narrows into the thrill of a jailbreak from a foreign justice system that seeks to make an example of ruthless punishment. Satya, a tightly coiled and deceptively lethal fighter who will stop at nothing to get Ankur home, teams up with a former mob boss (an endearing Manoj Pahwa) with an incarcerated son and an ex-cop (Rahul Ravindran) looking for redemption. Meanwhile, on the inside, Ankur aligns with several other prisoners against the sadistic warden Hans Raj Landa (Vivek Gomber), a fellow Indian in a foreign country.
The dual storylines ends up watering down the adrenaline, however, and distracts from the real star of the film: Bhatt, so magnetic and unpredictable as the undaunted older sister with boundless conviction. True to form, Bala attempts to pair emotional depth with lavish spectacle, and struggles with the range. The film is more successful in its quieter moments – basketball as a motif for a spiky sibling bond, Satya straining to look put together before her prison visit – than its archetypically bombastic and literally fiery ones. After several montages and more than one twist that blur together, those are the moments that stick.
• Jigra is in cinemas now.
