Policegiri starring Sanjay Dutt and Prachi Desai released this May just after Dutt was sentenced to three years in prison for the 1993 bomb blasts. The film was aired on television on August 18, 2013 -since it sank without a trace in the theatres. The only reason to watch it is for Sanjay Dutt if you are his fan and do not mind seeing him do the same things for the 200th time.

The film is just one more of the many efforts to show police like a one man army out to clean the baddies with a single pistol. The early scenes show an ageing Dutt beating up 30 bad men alone . He jumps from 30 feet and that scene looks like one of 1970s when such jumps were computer generated. He also enters bomb-making factories where the owner displays bombs as if they were Barbie dolls on display. On one table there are tiffin boxes and the owner says they are tiffin box bombs, those that kill children.

To top all that is the fact that Dutt is a DCP in the movie but a mysterious lonely one too who goes about his mission singularly. It is quite another thing for Amitabh Bachchan to do it in the 1970s when he was considered the voice against the Emergency, these days it is not heroic at all. Dutt is also shown entering police stations in simple disguise to catch the police officers red-handed and going unrecognised. In this age of Twitter and Facebook or just an over-crazy media, a DCP’s transfer is no secret mission. And at the police station, Dutt is shown loudly talking about police haftas commission etc. However rampant bribe-taking and giving is in our country, it is still spoken in hushed tones and definitely inside a police station.

The dialogues are as banal. The one in all promos shows Dutt telling the baddie that while the latter may have power and paisa etc, he has public with him. Whether this was added intentionally to resurrect Dutt’s career or because of his (then) impending court case is not known but it fails to impress totally. After Deewar and the maa dialogue and the countless parroting episodes, this one just does not work. Prachi Desai is used like a prop like in the olden days – these days with scripts like Kahani and Heroine, this movie would have made same sense without a heroine.

The fights are not astounding – in the age of Krish and Dhoom series, the ol’ style dishum dishum fails to excite. Dutt’s ‘tagda’ magic will not work if it is going to be the old wine in the same bottle. Dutt will have to change with time and court verdicts too.