Fateh: Sonu Sood’s Directorial Debut Is Campy & Excessive

IN AN IDEAL WORLD one would enter movie theatres without bias. But we don’t live in such a world and the prospect of watching an action venture, at a time when every second Hindi film has taken to weaponising the genre for agenda, is exhausting. Sonu Sood’s Fateh, written and directed by him, looks the part — the poster, for starters, features him pointing guns in all directions; enacts the part — there is an almost identical Animal-like fight scene towards the end where Sood, also the protagonist, hammers masked men to death. But in a bizarre segue, it resists inducing fatigue.

Multiple reasons come to mind. For one, casting Naseeruddin Shah (Raza) and Vijay Raaz (Satya Prakash) as cyber terrorists is inspired and campy. The actors would be more convincing as boomers unable to navigate technology but here they are, ageing men, carrying the know-how of data at their fingertips. It is a tough act to sell; both are irreverently committed and committedly irreverent about it. Shah moves his fingers up and down as the screen lights up with numbers. If further information is not divulged, I am willing to bet he shot his scenes at his home.

Ditto for Raaz, who spends a surprising amount of time looking surprised at the camera. When someone shoots the whiskey glass in his hand, he casually tilts head as if someone tapped his shoulder; when he is attacked, he looks as amused. Then there are the transitions, plenty of them.

Like most directorial debuts, Fateh puts the making in filmmaking. As kids call it today, everything is a little extra. The protagonist is shot in excessive slo-mo, his abs are given more attention than the script, an audacious decision to use Hans Zimmer’s music is deployed, and one transition follows another. And there are plenty.

It is utterly bizarre. In a film filled with blood, several scenes of ketchup, people eating or splattering them, are cut to actual blood being spilt. These keep happening till they sneakily grow on you, thwarting your disdain with abject ambition. There is also ambition in the film’s globe-trotting plot that honestly makes little sense but the maker refuses to hold back. A bunch of characters land up in San Francisco for one scene and honestly, I am a fan of such conviction.

Fateh is based on cybercrime and the surreptitious way a group of faceless people are stealing money from the middle class through data hacks. Sonu is Fateh, an entrepreneur in Punjab who gets embroiled in the dark web because a girl from his village becomes an unwitting perpetrator of this crime. Sood ties this with ethical hackers trying to prevent it, a backstory of nameless spies unceremoniously discontinued by the government and his own version of John Wick.

Written by Soon and Ankur Pajni, Fateh has at least five films rolled into it. And by the time the outing sluggishly moves towards the second half, a lot of threads are not just left open but forgotten. The central genesis of hackers taking money from the people is sidelined, the opening plot of the girl, Nimrat wanting to help people from her village gets overshadowed, and Raza and Satya Prakash are reduced to bystanders. What takes centrestage though is the action.

Sood is not the most watchable actor out there but he is compelling as the action star. There is a sleekness he brings to the scenes as he takes whatever he finds near his hands to stab the next person. In several scenes, the action is omitted to showcase the repercussions, like Fateh entering a lift filled with people and leaving it alone with bloodied dead bodies scattered across the floor. It gets repetitive but passes off as a nice subversion of the excessive action scenes we see of late, till the film goes full throttle at the end. Ears are sliced off, heads are drilled, and fingers are chopped till there is blood everywhere.

It is too much but what works here is the film’s sole commitment to this without resorting to chest-thumping statements. Sure, Fateh digresses so far from the opening that the starting point looks like a dot, sure setting the film in Punjab adds little context, sure watching Jacqueline Fernandez as Khushi, an ethical hacker, becomes another exercise of witnessing the actor speaking Hindi like her soul is in distress. And sure in every other scene that Sood doesn’t hit people, his eyes look worryingly dead.

But there is something to be said about the sweeping intent of the action hero who chooses no religion, no agenda and no nationalism to fight for. It ties up with the actor’s offscreen philanthropic persona and willingness to help scores of people during the pandemic. He hadn’t chosen sides then and in his directorial debut, he does the same. Granted it might amount to nothing but at a time when it has become so easy to preach, wanting to keep your head down and throw punches feels like the most heroic gesture.