Too Fatigued For RGV’s Police Company

In the grand circus of Bollywood, where originality is a rare guest and recycling is the house specialty, Ram Gopal Varma has once again decided that the Mumbai underworld still has unpaid rent in his imagination. T-Series and RGV have joined hands for Police Company, with Harshavardhan Rane stepping into the shoes of legendary encounter specialist Daya Nayak. Because clearly, the world was starving for yet another film about the man who has already inspired Ab Tak Chhappan, Aan: Men at Work, Risk – a Kannada biopic. RGV has drunk from the underworld so many times that the water must taste like leftover Satya, Company, D, Sarkar, Rakta Charitra and whatever else he poured into the same glass over three decades. The man once made Shiva in Telugu, remade it in Hindi, and then, years later, decided the world needed Shiva again in 2006, purely out of artistic restlessness, or so the legend of his arrogance goes. That third attempt did not exactly set the box office on fire. Yet here we are, watching the same director circle back to the same blood-soaked alleys, this time with the same encounter-cop template he already helped popularise. Recent years have not exactly been kind to the once-feared RGV brand. A string of flops, legal headaches, public spats and the general air of a man still fighting yesterday’s battles have followed him. The same man who once bent the crime film to his will now seems determined to prove that repetition, when done with enough swagger, can pass for reinvention. Whether Police Company will feel like a fresh bullet or just another spent casing remains to be seen. The underworld keeps dying on screen, and somehow Ram Gopal Varma keeps bringing it back to life.