Singham Again might be the most half-hearted, insincere film in Rohit Shetty’s career of two decades. Which is saying a lot, given that Shetty is a shining example of mainstream Hindi cinema’s convenient, shameless and shrewd populism.

Just look at his simplistic understanding of gender roles and patriotism, how he will blow the conch for Hindutva forces and alternate it with some of his insidious Islamophobia (like in Sooryavanshi and Indian Police Force), and his unsubtle endorsement for extra-judicial killings and custodial torture.

Like most of his peers, Shetty will say anything to get a clap out of his audience. It doesn’t matter how daft it sounds.

Like in a scene where a young boy asks his mother, who apparently works as a bureaucrat for the current government: “Did Ram really travel 3,000 km to save Sita?” The response is: “Of course, it’s a fact.”

Even in a Rohit Shetty film, where idiotic dialogue is par for the course, this line sticks out.

This comes shortly after a sequence plays out like a recruitment video for a Kashmir first-responder unit. It concludes with our protagonist (Ajay Devgn) coming face-to-face with a group of Kashmiri youth, right after he has captured a terrorist.

Shetty builds up the tension for a hostile confrontation, but then a young man blurts out, “Stone-pelting is a thing of the past. This is naya Bharat’s naya Kashmir.” Expectedly, a drone shot of the tricolour on Lal Chowk follows after this exchange.

Even by the standards of a desperate, needy Bollywood film, Singham Again proves there’s no low that is too low for a scheming blockbuster willing to trade decency for money and whistles.

Shetty’s latest is an Avengers-like version of his cop universe, assembling all his previous cops – Bajirao Singham (Ajay Devgn), Sangram Bhalerao or ‘Simmba’ (Ranveer Singh) and Veer Sooryavanshi (Akshay Kumar), along with upstarts Shakti Shetty (Deepika Padukone) and Satya (Tiger Shroff).

Shroff’s character isn’t even afforded the dignity of a surname, presumably because he’s an orphan. He shows up for a brief fight scene, followed up by a backstory that can be encapsulated in the time needed to make instant noodles.

Singh is the only actor with anything to offer, single-mindedly focused on making an impact in this crowded film and bringing it out of Devgn’s comatose presence. He appears to be improvising most of his lines for a role that is as thinly written as the ‘wife’ characters in the cop universe.

Kareena Kapoor Khan, resuming her role as Avni – the better-half from Singham Returns (2014) – undergoes the humiliation of playing a damsel in distress. It’s a wasteful, disgraceful part for someone with Khan’s talents.

But what makes Avni even more embarrassing is how Shetty posits her as a part of the ‘cultural ministry’, whose aim is to turn non-believers into giving credence to theories that the Ramayana is a part of our history and not just a mythological text.

She does this through a series of motion-graphic re-imaginings of the Ram Leela, where she parades urban legends as (pseudo) scientific findings. For a bureaucrat trying to rise up the ranks, it doesn’t seem that far off. But Shetty uses this gimmick as a tool to basically remake the Ramayana within his cop universe. Singham is Ram, Simmba is Hanuman… the villain (Arjun Kapoor) is Raavan. Yawn.

I don’t know how much Shetty is clued into the discourse on X, but he has been criticised in the past for the Islamophobia in his films. In this film, for the longest time, he teases the audience with a villain who is called Danger Lanka, not giving his real name till much later.

The villain, Arjun Kapoor, probably sees this as his moment to craft something as memorable as Alauddin Khilji in Padmaavat (2018). But he is never supported by Shetty’s (six) writers – Yunus Sajawal, Abhijeet Khuman, Kshitij Patwardhan, Anusha Nandakumar and Shantanu Srivastava. All Kapoor ever does is flash his pearly whites, while hacking people with a machete.

After resisting for what seems like an eternity, Shetty introduces Kapoor’s character as Zubair Hafeez. Almost on cue, Kapoor starts using words/phrases like ‘inteqaam ki fateh’, ‘maqsad’ and ‘jazbaa’, which feels as natural and organic as the face of a rapidly ageing Bollywood celebrity.

At first, I dismissed the choice of the name of the villain, Zubair, as a mere coincidence. But then I heard him speak a line that riffs on “Ayodhya toh bas jhaaki hai, Kashi ab bhi baaki hai” (Milap Zaveri is credited for ‘additional dialogues’), and I stopped giving the film the benefit of doubt. Shetty knows the kind of bloodlust he’s feeding; consciously destroying the cultural fabric, only to earn some more money.

One of the most unintentionally funny things about Shetty’s film is its innate fear of backlash of the kind Adipurush (an adaptation of the Ramayana) faced last year. Despite being one of the most pliant films for right-wing forces and something that was purposed as a Rs 500-crore star vehicle for Prabhas, Adipurush failed at the box office and was criticised for the liberties it took from all quarters.

Shetty didn’t want there to be any doubt in even the most distracted viewers of his film’s Hindu identity; hence he scores every second scene with a chant as our heroes walk in slow-motion, coupled with a deluge of Hindu iconography, which seems to be catering to the Hindutva types.

The film even explicitly mentions in its disclaimer that its characters are in no way to be seen as revered deities.

Even putting aside its saffron propaganda, Singham Again is arguably one of Shetty’s laziest undertakings. It shows in the unimaginative action sequences, the terrible dialogues and the absolute mockery of its superstar cameos, despite affording each and every star their own ‘entry’ sequence.

Imagine that Padukone, a naturally charismatic movie star, who made an impact in Jawan (2023) with two songs, seems cordoned off in her own film. We hardly see her interacting with the other characters, almost as if she shot her portions separately and was later digitally infused into the film.

Devgn, who has had an overwhelming need to be worshipped as a star in the last 15 years, has finally snuffed out any possibility of being admired as a once-hungry, sincere actor.

If films are a dish, then Singham Again is equivalent to the mush meant to feed babies and the elderly. Watching this film in the nearly packed theatre, I remember thinking whether we were already in an ideological apocalypse.

As much as I was bored by Shetty’s sloppiness as a storyteller, it was nowhere near the rage I felt towards how much of Singham Again had become fair game. I looked around – a guy behind me was running a live commentary of the film for his friend over the phone, this couple next to me couldn’t stop whispering through the film’s runtime, and this group of young boys kept talking amongst themselves as everyone around them, in a zombie-like way, pretended like this was normal behaviour in a theatre.

The viewers seemed determined – or were too distracted – to accommodate any unruly behaviour around them and uncomplainingly ate up anything that the film offered in the name of ‘mindless entertainment’. Maybe such people deserve Singham Again and Rohit Shetty.