Laal Kaptaan Review

I finally managed to watch Laal Kaptaan on Prime Video and I am not as thrilled as I thought I would be. Laal Kaptaan is a movie with a brilliant star cast, an amazing background score, and a decent portrayal of the period in which the movie is set. Sadly, the only promotion that I picked up was the set of trailers as the producers didn’t promote the movie enough for some reason.

Laal Kaptaan is directed by Navdeep Singh. The story is written by Deepak Venkateshan and the music is composed by Samira Koppiker. It's 155-minutes long, which is about the average length for a Bollywood movie.

The movie is set in the late 1700s and tells the story of an unnamed Gossain or a warrior-monk, who is a bounty hunter when he is not searching for his arch-nemesis Rehmat Khan, a subedar for a fort. Khan steals the treasure that he was supposed to pay to the Marathas and runs away, while a prophecy by Laal Pari (an Oracle) hangs over his child. Gossain encounters a few characters on the way who help propel the story forward: a mysterious widow and a tracker who can track anyone with their smell (along with his two dogs). The narration also reveals bits and pieces of information about the past of the Gossain as we move along the present-day story.

While I liked how the writers unfolded the story, I have problems with the pace and the characters of the movie. There were times, although not many, when I thought the movie was a bit slow. The plot of the movie is very thin and fairly straightforward. The characters of the movie lacked complexity: Rehmat Khan is a purely evil antagonist: killing men, women, and children. The unnamed Gossain is hell-bent on getting his revenge. The tracker is there for comic relief and helping out the protagonist and the widow, well, she does have a vested interest which would be kind of a spoiler.

The dialogues of the movie, however, make up for the lack of complexity in the plot and in the characters of the movie: “Jo aankhon se dikh jaaye, wo zakhm hi kya”, “Maut ki taiyaari paida hote hi shuru ho jaati hai”, etc. While many of the lines were inaudible/incomprehensible due to the then-used lingo, the dialogue delivery by Saif Ali Khan kept me hooked to the movie. That brings me to the actors of the movie.

The movie had a decent star cast: Saif Ali Khan as the unnamed Gossain, Manav Vij as Rehmat Khan, Deepak Dobriyal- whom you might know from Hindi Medium and Tanu Weds Manu- as the tracker, and Zoya Hussain as the widow. I felt that Manav didn’t do a convincing role as an antagonist. His dialogue delivery (or maybe the dialogues themselves) carried little weight and so did his mannerisms as a villainous Rohilla Chief. Saif Ali Khan, on the other end, impressed me as always. His costume, his mannerisms, and attitude as a Naga Sadhu are applaudable.

The acting of the cast met the high expectations I had from the movie but the plot failed to impress me. The unraveling of the threads, putting out little pieces of information to keep the audience hooked to the story helped me get through the long narrative. In conclusion, I would recommend watching it if you are a fan of Saif Ali Khan’s acting in off-beat roles, as I am sure many of us are after watching Sacred Games, Bazaar, and Tanhaji-The Unsung Warrior.