Fateh is basically the hero, as director, shooting himself, randomly shoot down hundreds on the go.
A still from Fateh
Fateh
A: Drama, action
Dir: Sonu Sood
Cast: Sonu Sood, Jacqueliene Fernandez
Rating: 1.5/5
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Fateh liver! It takes jigar/liver of another kind to so expensively mount a manic-actioner, wholly centred on yourself, onscreen—having not just written (story, screenplay, dialogues), but directed and produced it as well. That’s Fateh, this film. Even it feels a bit of a fatty liver, if you ask me.
What with a strange fascination for food porn, with close-up shots of samosas, egg-omelette, squishing ketchup on a plate, or tea into a cup, when the villain isn’t eating chocolate, or momos. It’s Sonu ki sweety, for his audience, after all.
Sonu, being the action star, who’s thus made his directorial debut. Where did it start from? By which I mean, the thought; not the movie itself.
I suspect the fact that video-game violence is the in-thing. And who can do it better than a brawny, 3BHK with washboard abs, Punjabi munda, aged 51, from Moga, who killed it as the villain Cheddi Singh from Dabangg (2010), after all?
Except, nobody’s offering him that lead role. So, he must offer it directly to his audience, instead.
Once that profound thought is in place, everything else will easily follow. In comes Fateh (Sonu). Unsure about his income, though.
Given that he usually parades in designer wear, expensive guns, talking shop in a Dubai yacht… For his current vocation, he’s a supervisor in a dairy farm in Punjab’s Moga, before he takes on Mogambos, obviously.
He used to be a top-level secret service agent; so khufiya/underground once, that he can cause khauf/scare of imaginable levels now.
That this much has been figured, of course, you would need to surround Sonu with sufficiently well-known names for this to seem a proper film, rather than simply a vanity project.
Therefore, Jacqueliene Fernandez—whose character, I don’t know does what for a living, except play around on computer screens, tracking hackers.
But she finds Sonu hot, and is too shy to tell. That’s the other Sonu ki sweety;besides the film, as I told you.
The villain ought to be plainly established too. And by that, I mean an equally established actor, i.e. Naseeruddin Shah, who flits in and out, every few minutes, in the same costume, watching the world move on screens, blabbering blah, standing next to his secretary in formal wear with supple cleavage.
That’s the chief villain in a movie, where practically everybody, but for the hero, is a villain, of course. You gotta pick your favourites then.
Mine’s the Chinese bloke Lee. To be sure that he’s indeed Chinese, out to screw Indians, he always holds a bowl of noodles in his hand, chomping on food with his chopsticks.
Desis, like Naseer and actor Vijay Raaz’s character, don’t like chopsticks. The latter finishes the villain off with this oriental piece of metallic cutlery itself. Which is just one of the many ingenious ways the villains die. The finest being a piece of wood that goes straight through both ends of a forehead.
Since the screenplay—that is, all of the above is in full sight—enough hence, for the hero, to go from hideout to hideout, just killing off all that he can see, amassing a body-count so huge in this orgy of violence, that you forget that all of this started because one girl, in the hero’s pind, went missing.
And that’s because she and others in the village had got conned in a loan-app scam! Indeed, cyber crime is the new uncontainable underworld.
But with so many deaths, without any consequences, must wonder, what’s the big deal that there are some dudes losing a lotta money!
At some point, the interval, to be precise, a warning scrolls on the screen suggesting, “Brace yourself, you’ll need the break,” or some such, in chaste English.
This is the part by when, I suspect, the filmmakers had watched Animal (2023), so the corridor sequence with masked men getting walloped, one by one, follows. I know they’ve already seen Jurassic Park (1993), so the plastic cup shaking with water inside has already happened!
Fateh is basically the hero, as director, shooting himself, randomly shoot down hundreds on the go.
What do I look at, since we’ve seen it all, anyway? Well, listen to the dialogues for personal pop-philosophy, then: “Bahut kam log jaante hai ko woh kam jaante hain (Few know that they know little); “Insaan samajhta hai apni samajh ke hisaab se (Man is limited by his own understanding).” Hmmm… Like; much.
Frankly, I like Sonu Sood more. Not just as an actor—and he’s bloody convincing as the brooding brawn, alright. But more so for what he did during the pandemic—ferrying, if I’m not mistaken, 7.5 lakh migrants back to their homes.
Fateh is not his forte. It’s tragic for a film industry that more competent writers/directors/producers couldn’t see sense in platforming the self-made Sonu through a script that does his genuine stardom fair justice.
And that, poor guy, has to do everything on his own. Besides spend on the film like it’s a global langar, even bring down at least one huge international talent for it.
Which is the only thing this film will leave behind—a popular trivia question. Play the track ‘To the moon’. Ask for its significance. It’s composer Hans Zimmer’s Bollywood debut. In Fateh. Waah!
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