Manikarnika: A true tribute or a stunt show?

Friday, the 25th of January saw the release of a very anticipated historical theatrical venture, Manikarnika. This film, starring actor Kangana Ranaut in the lead role as Queen Laxmibai of Jhansi, whose initial name from birth was Manikarnika.

The story aims to focus on the life history of the brave ruler of the state of Jhansi and how she laid her life for the potential freedom of her reigning territory and country over 160 years ago. Here is a review of this movie, that may have not made as big a mark on the audience as it hoped and was expected to.

Manikarnika: The Queen of Jhansi

Directors: Kangana Ranaut, Raja Krishna Jagarlamudi

Cast: Kangana Ranaut, Atul Kulkarni, Jisshu Sengupta, Danny Denzongpa, Suresh Oberoi, Ankita Lokhande

Rating: 3/5

IMdB: 8.5/10

Manikarnika was a film expected to join the fleet of great films of 2019 with The Accidental Prime Minister, Uri: The Surgical Strike, and Thackeray, but it didn’t quite live unto that mark. Manikarnika – The Queen of Jhansi, is too exhausting a film to send the audience home bubbling with enthusiasm.

The visual effects are low-grade, the stilted dialogues reek of laziness, the onscreen performances are pedestrian and the sets have a hurriedly-erected feel.

The film, for which the lead actor Ranaut herself takes credit for direction alongside Raja Krishna Jagarlamudi blows the studded history of this legendary warrior to smithereens and reduces this story of on of the greatest Indian warriors to a mere stunt show.

The film seems as historically accurate as Mel Gibson’s Braveheart — which is to say it prizes the valorous myth, and takes ’creative liberties’ to tell its story. This works as long as the story is gripping. Directed by Ranaut and Radha Krishna Jagarlamudi, Manikarnika achieves the simplistic ambition of saluting the legendary queen, but feels too long and a bit too cardboard.

The budgetary constraints show. The patchwork is constant. However, it must be said that all our period epics look like filmed theatre productions (only in the Baahubali films do swords appear heavy) and there is a straightforward earnestness to Manikarnika, even when craft is lacking. This one feels less wasteful than excessive period catastrophes, and I’d readily pick it over a baroque Sanjay Leela Bhansali carnival.

The overall impact is admittedly Amar Chitra Katha, and the storytelling is structured like a children’s film — albeit one with a fair bit of blood — which may not be a bad move, considering how quickly viewers get used to the simplistic syntax. There is much that is laughable, not least the British villains who attend court wearing bowlers and top hats and retire for wartime sleep in black satin pyjamas, but like the history books have always advertised about Jhansi, this is a one-woman show.

Kangana settles into a predictable pattern. She smiles through many of the most difficult situations that the rani faces, sports a smirk when she has to exude insouciance, goes all wide-eyed and holds an unblinking gaze when the idea is to convey obduracy, and raises her voice several notches to represent unbridled rage.

All through the film, Kangana flits from one of the above moods to another, but the film never sheds its monotony. Especially mechanical are the battle scenes – they might be sporadic but when one erupts it goes on forever, consuming a lot of the film’s two-and-a-half-hour runtime.

Manikarnika is agonizingly soulless. Platitudes piled upon synthetic platitudes do not add up to great cinema, especially when none of the film’s war cries delivers any bang for its buck. Save yours and give the film a miss unless you like the sound of misfires.