The best performance in this honourable, though not outstanding sequel, comes from that neglected and grossly underrated actor Amit Sial, who plays a crooked Mr Fix-it in the income tax department: just what is needed in our askew bureaucratic system.

Rajkumar Gupta’s Raid 2 is not quite the rousing anti-corruption chant that we expect it to be after the 2018 revenue buster, which had Sourabh Shukla as the hefty hoarder. Shukla keeps popping up in the sequel as well, for reasons that are not too apparent, except to perhaps taunt the hero Amay Patnaik (Ajay Devgn) each time he seems to slip up in the line of a duty, or otherwise to heckle his fellow-offender, a political heavyweight named Dada Manohar Bhai, played heftily by Riteish Deshmukh.

Advertisement

His character’s sins are so heavily buried under the rubble of mob idolatry that it almost seems like a set-up. The script extracts Dada Manohar Bhai’s vileness with ruthlessness like cavity-ridden teeth.

Regrettably, the anti-corruption zeal is, on this occasion, unsupported by a strong motivation. The characters seem to roam around in search of a cause bigger than the one that seems apparent: to merely tap into a potentially successful franchise with a racy sequel.

But it is a brisk risk. The writing, credited to as many as four writers, is all over the place, swinging from one low-hanging branch to another in the hope of finding its bearing at the end. But I don’t think the plot really adds up. There are too many loose ends thrown around for us to chew on.

To cite an example, at the start, the intrepid IRS hero asks for a huge bribe from an economic offender as a ploy to nab the culprit.  But which bureaucrat in his right mind would risk his job and reputation?

Amay Patnaik’s colleagues, who seemed like a gutsy, real bunch of dedicated officers in the earlier film, are here reduced to borderline caricatures. The exception of course is Lallan Sudhir, whom Amit Sial plays as much the characters plays the villain. It is a role with a scandalous road map that Sial negotiates with a notable swag.

As for Ajay Devgn, lately he has been seen doing nothing to his characters. The suave equipoise is now wearing thin. Something else, please.

Raid 2 is not really the sequel we would have liked to see. But it is not all a loss either. It has a rugged energy to its storytelling.  But very little characterisation to justify the presence of a sequel. The women are woefully underwritten in the plot. Supriya Pathak as the villain’s mother has her sporadic outbursts, but not enough. As for Vaani Kapoor, she has little to do except to show the camera how well she carries off the saree. Lame attempts to include her in the climax only accentuate what we already know about films on truelife heroes:  behind every successful man, there is a woman; and she stays behind.

Rating: ***