Sarkar Raj Movie Review

Released: June 6, 2008

Running time: 2hrs 10 mins.

Language: Hindi with English subtitles

Produced by: K. Sera Sera, Z. Picture Company

This heavy handed sequel to "Sarkar", took itself too seriously and bored the audience; well at least it bored me. The story line, written by Prashant Pandey and Ram Gopal Varma (also director), started off very slow with too many posing shots of actors' faces reflecting on boring conversational vignettes and didn't pick up pace until the second half of the movie. The main characters were wooden and too reserved to be members of a mafia style family. They were more like a family of accountants. The villains were one-dimensional comic book style caricatures without humanity. Some were so poorly written they were comical which I'm pretty sure that was not the original intention. Case in point, Hassan Qazi (Govind Namdeo) one of the gangsters working against the power plant idea, constantly talked in philosophical riddles that on closer examination turned out to be nonsense.

In the original movie "Sarkar", the musical build-up let the audience know that something exciting or dramatic was about to happen. This musical score, by Amar Mohile, in "Sarkar Raj", was inspiring but unfortunately added nothing to the tension of the scenes, because it was always tense without any down time. There were also no emotional or physical pay-offs for the increasingly loud "Govinda, Govinda" chant in many scenes.

Amit Roy (cinematographer) had very imaginative and interesting camera styles in "Sarkar Raj". Unfortunately, again, they did little to enhance the storyline of the movie except during the riot scenes where the jumpy camera shots added to the real world feel. The swinging camera view was a good start but became tedious and made this movie reviewer sea sick. This movie will be helpful to cinematography students who want to get ideas for school projects like "Shots Through a Glass Table 101".