Laal Kaptaan Reviews (Top Critics)

Frankly, there's far more to this film than for it to be looked at simply centred on its star (Saif Ali Khan), who's stunning, no doubt. Or the rating, that by virtue of it being vaguely indicative, becomes reductive, anyway. What we effectively experience here is a valiant attempt at merging the East, with the Western. By which I mean not the West.

LAAL KAPTAAN is the story of revenge spanning a couple of decades. The year is 1789, 25 years after Battle of Buxar. Hunter (Saif Ali Khan) is a Naga Sadhu who's looking for a man called Rehmat Khan (Manav Vij). Through Noor Bibi (Sonakshi Sinha), Hunter finds out that Rehmat is a governor of a kingdom somewhere in North India.

Laal Kaptaan is a hardcore revenge drama set against the backdrop of The Battle of Buxar 1764. Saif Ali Khan plays the son of a Rohilla chieftain whose father gets betrayed by his own people and is hanged by the British. The teenager gets adopted by a group of Naga Sadhus who teach him warcraft, among other things.

Laal Kaptaan is set in the late 1800s, around 25 years after the Battles of Plassey and Buxar. The British East India Company has begun to cement its position in India. British army men, Afghan warriors, bounty hunters, Marathas, and other tribes are roaming the land. Among them is a Naga sadhu seeking vengeance.

In Navdeep Singh's Laal Kaptaan, eighteenth-century India isn't the nicest place to be. The Battle of Buxar of 1764 has been fought and lost, and organised Indian resistance to colonial rule is some decades away. The Marathas, British and Mughals are competing to whittle down the population.

Laal Kaptaan, set in pre-Independence India, tracks a Naga sadhu who is on a dangerous quest. We follow Gossain (Khan) as he makes his way through the hilly ravines of Bundelkhand, dotted with castles and caves and armed contingents of British, Mughal and Maratha soldiers, battling bandits-with-'inaam'-on-their-heads, and being tasked by masked women with scarred cheeks-and-souls.

Set in the ravines of Bundelkhand against the 1764 Battle of Buxar, LAAL KAPTAAN is a tale of a bloody vengeance they say. Saif Ali Khan plays the son of a Rohilla chieftain who gets adopted by a group of Naga Sadhus after the death of his father. He learns sword fighting and other arts from the naga sadhus. Grows up into a bounty hunter who's thirsty for the blood of his father's killer.

In an 18th century setting, a Naga sadhu in India sets out on a journey across Bundelkhand to seek revenge for an injustice committed in the past. What is his motive and who is he really, forms the rest of the plot.

Well into the second half of Laal Kaptaan, an overlong film that takes a circuitous route to its climax and spends an awfully long time to get there, one character says: "Duniya gol hai, jo kal hua woh phir kal hoga, (The world is round, what happened yesterday will happen again tomorrow). But that is not to say that director Navdeep Singh's third film leaves us in a totally baffled state.

Laal Kaptaan, is an ambitious story about deceit and valour. The film takes a quick visit back in history to the times when East India Company was making rapid strides in India, buying allies and bullying foes -Mughals, Rohillas, Marathas- to establish complete control over India. It really is a great story by director Navdeep Singh and Deepak Venkatesh. Unfortunately by the time the story moves from the storyboard onto film it gets lost in translation.