It will be not wrong to say "Chengiz" is not the perfect film for pan India release,because it has nothing new for the people outside Bengal. The primal fact being the superstardom of Jeet will not work because of the minimum exposure of Bengali commercial film outside. The second reason is the selling point of the film being overused in many commercial films i.e a child wronged by authority rises to become a gangster for vengeance. People might say ,many films of these same template has become a commercial hit from other regional industries ,but just look at the stars of those films,whose name is enough to pull the audiences. Frankly,jeet doesn't have that .Now we may think about KGF 's meteoric success,where everything was relatively new,the director,the lead ,but the fact in Karnataka,there is a huge market for commercial films in the state itself.
In the past few years,proper mass films have considerably reduced in Bengal,single screens have been closed and thus the alienation of bengali films from rural or common audiences. They are resorting to hindi dubbed south Indian films on YouTube and day by day they are losing interest in bengali films. Now the situation is that except towns,bengali films are finding it difficult to cater audiences.
Amidst all this ,jeet announces his next film "Chengiz" which will be the first Bengali film to be dubbed in Hindi and released alongside. But the sheer ignorance of the fact that why people outside bengal would watch this is surprising.
If looked from only bengali commercial landscape,"Chengiz" is a long awaited bliss,it is definitely a proper mass entertainer. But for a moment,think about mumbai,pune ,bhopal audiences,they have seen Vikram vedha,lucifer and many other similar films where they know the lead ,there is a certain fan-base of those stars too. Then why they would be seeing the same thing from a unknown face.
It is evident from the teaser and trailer,that the film's story-line is the 70's but the blatant negligence in production design is thoroughly pathetic. There is no effort whatsoever to recreate the period the story is set in. I would not be saying this if this was not an pan India release,they could have surely upped the cost there to make it at least visually believable.
The film tries to not be entirely herocentric,in the first 30 mins Jeet has hardly few scenes,it exercises on the world building which is a decent move. There were hardly a few scenes where we saw protagonist's desire for vengeance steaming up,his relation with his uncle which could have been a sure-shot emotional arc is underutilized. There is a constellation of interesting side characters developed during the narrative. But they were never utilized to their fullest,but still for a film belonging to this template I couldn't complain as this is how it supposed to be.
Jeet owns every scene he is in,his aura,his charisma as proper mass film hero is established in the film. There are certain qualities of a mass action hero,he has all in it. But as pseudo intellectual society we belong to now,it is sad how will bengalis will ignore this to watch other things. As a community we never stick to our own,we will watch KGF,Pushpa,RRR but when it comes to Bengali commercial films we are suddenly intellectual which is downright hypocrisy. The supporting performances are good also especially Shataf Figar as an egoistic gang lord .The dialects used by the gangsters worked well also. The dismal turn of Susmita Chatterjee as a female lead is somewhat surprising,the love arc seems to there for the sake of it. She fails to emote ,express in any scenes of the film. In films like these,people rarely expects female lead to have a lasting presence,but that doesn't mean that the output will be this awful.
The amateurish scene transitions are a huge eyesore and hamper the flow. The action sequences are shot well and the depiction of blood and gore are not anyways timid,it suits to the genre and one of the redeeming factors of the film. The background music is overbearing at times and also the songs are forgettable.
The fact that this film is not a remake and is relying on an original script which had its roots in the city itself is praiseworthy. It had been a long time after perhaps,bengali commercial films are tapping this territory.
It is a bliss that someone is trying to put us on national map in commercial films but this is not the right film to do that. Despite all the blemishes all those drawbacks,we must break our hypocritical pretentiousness and just gave these films a chance. A industry relies on star power,which is absent for many years and someone is trying to bring that back,it might be criticized but must never be ignored.
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