Get ready for your next high octane does of bombastic Bollywood action! The hotly anticipated Bholaa is in cinemas now.
Directed by and starring Bollywood A-lister Ajay Devgn, Bholaa is a remake of the 2019 Tamil-language hit Kaithi. As the titular character, Devgn plays a recently released prisoner who wants nothing more than to reunite with his young daughter, Jyoti, after serving a punishing 10 year stretch.
Unfortunately for him, but fortunately for fans of OTT action spectacle, he’s quickly re-arrested, things go sideways with worrying rapidity, and he soon finds himself driving a truckload of drunk cops through a gauntlet of heavily armed gang members who are determined to kill the lot of them. Meanwhile, tough cop Diana Joseph (Tabu, familiar to western audiences from her role in Ang Lee’s Life of Pi) tries to help from the outside. But, as these things invariably go, things are going to get a whole lot worse before we get within spitting distance of a happy ending for our hero.
We’re getting strong Con Air memories off the back of this one, with a little Assault on Precinct 13 and The Warriors thrown in for good measure, which strikes us as a winning combination for those with a taste for gritty urban mayhem. Like the latter two, Bholaa is set over the course of a single night, with the action escalating inexorably to an completely insane conclusion (the climax of the source film, Kaithi, involved a minigun – let’s see if the Hindi-language redux can top that).
Bholaa marks Devgn’s fourth outing as directorial after U Me Aur Hum (2008), Shivaay (2016), and Runway 34 (2022). He’s certainly riding the current wave of Indian action success; while seemingly everyone saw and loved the Telugu-language break out hit RRR, the recent espionage actioner Pathaan amply demonstrated that the subcontinent is busily making stupendously violent epics fit to rival anything that Hollywood can offer right now. If Bholaa is half as good as those two, we’re in for a hell of a ride.
