Content Warning: This is a review of the movie Baby John, and it includes disturbing topics, including discussion of rape, torture, and violence against women and children.
No matter where you are in the world, police propaganda has the same problem: how to justify violence meted out by cops with the needs of a peaceful society. Baby John gets even darker with its copaganda, because it goes further than law-and-order fantasy. It celebrates a policeman who takes pleasure in torturing and murdering bad guys. The kind of bad guys who kidnap a little girl off the school bus, rape her for days and then burn her alive in front of her disabled parents, but still. The violence in Baby John is so brutal – separate to all the torture and murder there’s a remarkable amount of injury detail on little kids – that it’s not really possible to enjoy. It’s not even grand Guignol, even if it is completely over the top. In spite of this, there’s an interesting if misguided attempt to redefine heroism within Baby John that makes it worth seeing, if not recommended.
John (Varun Dhawan) is a baker and single dad whose precocious brat of a daughter Khushi (Zara Zyanna) calls him baby. One afternoon after school her teacher, the delightful Miss Tara (Wamiqa Gabbi), notices a crying girl in the trunk of a car, sneakily rescues her from the evil people traffickers, and gets Baby John to give them a lift to the police station. This not only brings up some buried trauma within Baby John, it also brings a whole bunch of the evil bad guys to his door. There’s a rainstorm, so Khushi sleeping in her bedroom hears nothing as her father tightens his dhoti and kills every single one of them. In an admirable display of multi-tasking, Baby John also does so while allowing his abs to enjoy the night breeze. In the aftermath, Miss Tara realises Baby John’s true identity: he is actually former ‘supercop’ Satya Varma, whose motto was “good vibes only” even as he poured a substance over someone so their facial features remained recognisable while they were set on fire and burnt to death. Satya faked his own death shortly after Khushi was born because of the terrible villain Nanaji (Jackie Shroff). And in case we don’t think Nanaji is the worst, he is introduced killing a deliveryman with a hatchet, having first made the deliveryman dig his own grave, for the crime of messing up a lunch order.
The flashbacks explaining the deal with Nanaji also manage the question of Khushi’s absent mother, who is revealed to be Meera (Keerthy Suresh), a fetching young doctor. Her ‘meet cute’ with Satya is when he brings to her hospital a different group of people traffickers who he beat up singlehanded in a street fight in moving traffic. Thanks to Mr. Dhawan’s baby face and incredible charm Meera falls in love with Satya over the objections of her cop-hating father (Anoop Puri). You’d think his objections would have become more strenuous when their introductory meeting becomes a targeted assassination by another large group of Nanaji’s men. Fortunately, Satya brought his gun to the coffeeshop, and when he eventually runs out of bullets kills everybody else with plastic cutlery and a disturbing smile on his face. But this kind of John-Wick-inspired violence is okay! It’s important to be willing to kill like this in order to keep your family safe! And even as we can appreciate the stunt crews having a field day with all the gore and mayhem, the absolute joy in pain being inflicted on display is disturbing.
And yet. The message that violence is A-OK if it’s aimed at people exploiting women and children is not the worst it could be. The sequence where a deeply corrupt policeman (who hits a crying woman trying to report her missing daughter in the face) gets his comeuppance is a bravura sequence of mood and pace. Unfortunately, this matches little else within the film, which, between the fights, is mainly men talking about how much they dislike it when women are mistreated. The women themselves don’t get much to say or do, although Meera’s big final scene gives Ms. Suresh an incredible amount of very difficult acting, and the big romantic song between Satya and Meera allows both Ms. Suresh and Mr. Dhawan to bring a sense of humour to their dancing. Ms. Gabbi also gets several good action scenes of her own and young Miss Zyanna handles an extraordinary amount of peril unusually well.
And yet. The final shot – a crowd of young women screaming in rage – means it’s a surprise when director Kalees smash-cuts to a dedication saying “FOR THE FATHERS.” It’s clear that this Hindi movie (a remake of the Tamil movie Theri, which was itself loosely inspired by the Jason Statham action movie Homefront) is hoping its target audience of young men will do some hard thinking about how they treat the women in their lives. The trouble is that there’s so much joy in the violence it’s hard to come away feeling it’s bad. Regardless of the excellence of their abs, someone who goes around burning rapists to death is probably not all that pleasant themselves. It’s depressing that something designed as copaganda ended up cheering on vigilante justice. Baby John would have been much better if it had managed to do only one or the other.
Baby John is now playing in limited theaters.
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