<h2>Raid 2 U/A: Drama, thriller Dir: Raj Kumar Gupta Cast: Ajay Devgn, Riteish Deshmukh, Vaani Kapoor Rating: 3/5</h2>
Not that Raid 2 has a sutradhaar (narrator) &mdash; but a cute, portly prison inmate, Tau, played by <a href="https://www.mid-day.com/entertainment/bollywood-news/article/salman-khan-once-schooled-his-assistant-for-giving-acting-advice-to-saurabh-shukla-23500055" target="_blank" rel="none noopener">Saurabh Shukla</a>, appears at regular intervals, to drop truth bombs.
One such is to a flunky cop in jail, who sucks up to him: &ldquo;Lamba kheloge. Chaatne ki kala hai [tumme], chaato, Girdhari!&rdquo;
Making the point about how a sure-shot way to tell a middling underling is they make up for their mediocrity,by lauding their supposed superior, always.
Likewise, he suggests, politicians never get caught for their crimes. Unless, it&rsquo;s an inside job. Who is this Tau, otherwise unrelated to the rest of the film?
For that, you will have to vividly remember Raj Kumar Gupta&rsquo;s Raid (2018), the prequel to this picture.
Which was essentially about an income tax (IT) raid, set in 1981, Lucknow, netting a top UP don. That was Saurabh Shukla (Rameshwar Singh/Rajaji/Tau).
Raid was based on a true story, detailing what perhaps still remains the longest IT raid conducted on a private individual. By the looks of it (and I could be wrong here), Raid 2 isn&rsquo;t adapted from an actual episode.Or at least not one such, anyway; maybe a bunch of them.
What remains in common, of course, is Ajay Devgn as the IT sleuth, in hot pursuit of black money, hidden by a prominent/popular heartland politician. It&rsquo;s been eight years since. The prime minister is evidently VP Singh (it was Indira Gandhi in the first part).
The lead character, it seems, has got himself a new wife <a href="https://www.mid-day.com/amp/entertainment/bollywood-news/article/fawad-khan-calls-abir-gulaal-co-star-vaani-kapoor-a-very-spontaneous-actor-23525081" target="_blank" rel="none noopener">(Vaani Kapoor</a> switched over from Ileana D&rsquo;Cruz)! But his reason of existence remains the same.
This gent is Amay Patnaik that in itself is such a non-filmy name &mdash; with Devgn, in shirt, trousers, Relaxo-type floaters, hardly ever allowing his heroic swag to overwhelm this government-servant character&mdash;that, as an audience, you subconsciously stay with his sincerity, all through.
And he never lets you down onscreen.
What&rsquo;s kinda unclear to me is the size of his opponent. In the sense that the film starts off in Rajasthan, 1989, with the action shifting to a town called Bhoj, where the honest sarkari hero is on his 74th transfer.
If I&rsquo;m not mistaken, Bhoj is a small-town in Karnataka. This one is perhaps fictional &mdash; lorded over by one man, who runs/owns practically the entire town, including its people.
Riteish Deshmukh smartly plays this excessively sober politician (as most politicians actually are) &mdash; so powerful, that the state government runs on his borrowed MLAs; while, if I saw right, he&rsquo;s also a member of parliament!
In the real world, this would be a mismatched David vs Goliath kinda story. What follows, however, is a Tom &amp; Jerry chase, with both protagonist and antagonist inevitably turning a corner &mdash; turning the film, in turn, into a proper thriller.
Raid 2 is an action-packed film. Yet, not one knuckle gets broken, with neither lead-bloke swinging in the air, in multiple directions!
It&rsquo;sthe form of sorted theatrical writing that we seem to be progressively moving away from &mdash; heading instead towards stunts for stunts&rsquo; sake. You needn&rsquo;t pour blood to hold people&rsquo;s attention, right? And director Gupta (No One Killed Jessica, Aamir) gets this right.
So far as the genre is concerned, it&rsquo;s certainly a comeback of sorts for him since India&rsquo;s Most Wanted (2019). Which, in a similarly realisticspace, felt relatively underwhelming.
What was the impact of the OG Raid? One tends to over-judge movies by their consumer reviews, and more so, box-office numbers.
I recently met a young Indian Revenue Service (IRS) officer, who actually joined the service, because he was so influenced by this pic&rsquo;s prequel! Would you imagine?
I&rsquo;ve got to learn a lot more about how honest IRS officers operate from him. And my sense is, as bureaucrats like Amay in this movie show &mdash; they do have the freedom to act (against the immeasurably corrupt). In some cases, there may not be much freedom after the act!
Going back to &lsquo;truth bomb&rsquo; Tau&rsquo;s line in this film, when the lead character has been suspended from service for going after a big cat, &ldquo;For a khuddar/self-respecting man, worse than going to jail is living off your parents-in-law!&rdquo; Amay does.
Why have I incessantly compared this sequel to the original that was so much more an indoorsy, talkie drama, though?
Because the filmmakers expect you to &mdash; repeating so many of the tropes/characters, as tributes, that some may feel like they&rsquo;re like watching a rehash, or the second season of the same show. They aren&rsquo;t mistaken in their view. It could also be a compliment.
But this stuff is suitably different in its sameness. It belongs more to post-pandemic cinemas of 2025. As in, written as two distinct halves &mdash; separated by an item song, and an interval.
Wherein the second instalment is more about unleashing a separate lot of characters for comedy, thriller, mystery&hellip;
Bloating up the script a bit much after half-time, hence &mdash; to make it all the more accessible to wider audiences. Yes, it&rsquo;s a stretch. But all of it serving the purpose of popular entertainment. So, no sweat. No sweat at all!<script type="text/javascript">atOptions={'key':'d0ddb8ef8f1a62a8cdd22fac27fc5ea7','format':'iframe','height':90,'width':728,'params':{}};</script>
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Raid 2
U/A: Drama, thriller
Dir: Raj Kumar Gupta
Cast: Ajay Devgn, Riteish Deshmukh, Vaani Kapoor
Rating: 3/5

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