Film: Ek Villain Returns
Director: Mohit Suri
Actors: John Abraham, Arjun Kapoor, Disha Patani, Tara Sutaria
Rating: *1/2

For reasons altogether professional, I’ve been obsessed with traditional Bollywood villains lately. By which I mean a category of characters, who merged with the same set of actors, film after film—such that soon as, say, Prem Chopra or Ranjeet or Ajit showed up on screen back in the day, the audiences knew they’d be up to some bad. This saved on screen time. This continued for decades.

Up until the ’90s, I think, specifically, Abbas-Mustan’s 'Baazigar' (1993) onwards, when the lead actors began to take on the anti-hero roles too. Also, as the films’ running time came down, and the hero-heroine’s parts remained the same, the stock villain’s parts (like the mother, sister, brother) began to recede. Which is not what happened in the mainstream South, for instance.