Movie Review: Bollywood Film – Main Atal Hoon

Ravi Jadhav & Rishi Virmani’s story once again proves how not every great story can be turned into a biopic. I had similar issues with Omung Kumar’s PM Narendra Modi biopic, whose review I titled “Even the greatest stories need good narrators!” That should be the same one-liner review for this one as well.

Following Wikipedia’s bullet points treatment, the narration is exceptionally bland to execute even the greatest milestones of Shri Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s career. Yes, we all know it’s a yesteryear story, but the ‘gloomification’ of its visual theme is so high that it starts hurting your eyes after a point of time.

I don’t think I’ve ever been so critical about a Pankaj Tripathi performance, but this is not it. Not because he’s doing something wrong, but because he didn’t notice he’s doing something wrong throughout the film. His impersonation of Shri Atal Vajpayee steers to the caricature land way too often than you’d expect. He tries hard, but it just looks like he’s reading the dialogues instead of just delivering them.

The pauses between the lines and the rhythm may all be an ‘Atal’ trait, but it just doesn’t land how I expected it to be. The subtlety is missing. Why did the makers even try to make him look like a college student? The whole sequence was awkward because how would you serve a 47-year-old as a student without de-aging? None of the other actors make it up.

Ravi Jadhav‘s direction never allows the narration to achieve the desired impact. Even the high-voltage sequences pass away blandly because of poor writing.

Monty Sharma’s ear-deafening background score serves no purpose, being just another misfit amidst all the other misfits. You won’t listen to any of its songs for the second time, and that says everything about its soundtrack.