Satyagraha Reviews Topic - Page 8

Satyagraha movie review: Predictable story spoon-fed with sincerity!
Friday, Aug 30, 2013, 17:00 IST | Agency: Bollywoodlife.com
Prathamesh Jadhav

In his earnest attempt to capture the sorry state of our crippling nation where blatant corruption, social unrest and scams have become the order of the day, director Prakash Jha weaves a story that asks the right questions, but doesn't quite succeed in producing a riveting cinematic treat.
- Bollywoodlife.com

In a heart-wrenching moment in the climax of Prakash Jha's political thriller Satyagraha, Amitabh Bachchan's character questions, "Humne yeh kaisa desh banaya hain?" The line lingers in your head and haunts you for a very long time after the movie is over.

In a country where corruption is so deeply entrenched in our system as well as in our collective psyche, scams get unearthed every day and politicians are frowned upon for the sorry state of the nation, Jha dares to portray a sincere story to reflect the angst, frustration and helpless of the aam aadmi through this movie. But the director weaves the plot in a rather over-simplified manner that makes the film entertaining in pieces, but in its entirety the picture doesn't quite look thought-provoking and almost always comes across stupendously preachy.

Interestingly and ironically, Jha is the same man who gave us some really dramatic and gripping tales in the past like Gangaajal, Apaharan and Raajneeti. But going by his last venture Aarakshan and now Satyagraha, it seems the intelligent director repeatedly resorts to an easy formula of casting many actors in his movies and layering his stories with subplots where romance, action, heroism, tragedy and drama are all rolled into conveniently crafted commercial packages.

Satyagraha asks many pertinent questions on many levels and also sends the right message " the road to a corruption-free state is not an easy one and the required changes won't happen overnight. Jha portrays the story and uses the potentiality of his actors to the best of his ability, but fails to give us a film that can stimulate the audience's minds. At best Satyagraha offers everything readily on the platter and Jha does not hesitate to spoon-feed the audience with utmost sincerity.

What's the story of Satyagraha?

Retired teacher Dwarka Anand (Amitabh Bachchan) is an idealist whose engineer son Akhilesh dies in a road accident. Minister Balram Singh (Manoj Bajpayee) announces compensation, which Akhilesh's widow Sumitra (Amrita Rao) struggles to get in spite of making daily rounds to government offices. Angry at the way in which the corrupt babus operate, Dwarka slaps an arrogant high-ranking official and gets imprisoned. The late engineer's closest buddy Manav Raghvendra (Ajay Devgn) " a self-made money man " comes to Dwarka's rescue.

A local wannabe politician-cum-goonda Arjun (Arjun Rampal) and star reporter Yasmin Ahmed (Kareena Kapoor) join the fray. Together the team uses the power of social media to spur a political movement that soon snowballs into a corruption hatao aandolan. But the path to a clean and corruption-free state is straddled with many challenges, dirty politics and blood-bath. Can peace processes and talks alone bring about the much-needed change in the system? Or do non-violent protests, rebellion and revolutionary ideas go hand-in-hand to bring about the change?

Why should you watch Satyagraha?

Watch Satyagraha for the explosive performances from Manoj Bajpayee and Amitabh Bachchan " strictly in the same order. While Bajpayee plays this scheming politician- showcasing his guile and venality with absolute ease, Bachchan plays this morally upright and idealistic Anna Hazare-inspired character with brilliance.

Ajay Devgn conveys a range of emotions by using just his eyes coupled with his terrific screen presence. Arjun Rampal, Amrita Rao and Kareena Kapoor should have invested more into their respective characters emotionally.

Satyagraha reflects the uncontrollable anger and restlessness of a nation sitting on the democratic time bomb that is about to burst. From the degrading moral values to the brazenly corrupt system to the collapsing economy, Jha portrays the plight of the aam aadmi with a simple plot.

What hasn't worked in Satyagraha?

Kareena Kapoor's passionate television reporter is too pretty to look at. Even when the city is burning and a civil war of sorts erupts, the babe looks all dolled up " not a streak of her paper straight hair out of place. The rest of the characters saunter in and out of the frame in linen, khadi and authentic traditional outfits, perhaps to hammer into your head that this film is a socio-political drama.

Though Big B has delivered one of the finest performances of recent times, his character seems to have a hangover from his earlier films such as Aarakshan, Sarkar and Mohabbatein. A humble teacher from a small town using his rich baritone to sound like a superhero is hard to digest.

The chemistry equation that Ajay and Kareena share is highly unconvincing and even looks stupid at times. Watching the two romancing each other in a song in a movie that is necessarily a political thriller is laughable.

Since the film boasts of an ensemble cast comprising many mighty stars, it seems the director was busy making sure that each character gets substantial screen time rather than getting his screenplay right and editing sharp.

Except for the Raghupati Raghav track, the other songs are not particularly hummable and seem oddly placed.

Jha happily plugs in a brand of Basmati rice and cement each in a movie that deals with ideologies and questions capitalism.

All in all, director Prakash Jha's Satyagraha is a film made with a noble intention to create an impact, but the not-so-tight execution of a flat storyline with loopholes the size of lunar craters leaves you with the empty feeling you get after watching a strictly okay commercial entertainer!

Rating: **1/2

Film Review | Satyagraha
Prakash Jha's new film about the politics of the common man is a noisy, soulless pastiche
Sanjukta Sharma

First Published: Fri, Aug 30 2013. 02 27 PM IST

Ajay Devgn in a still from Satyagraha'
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There is never a wrong time to incite or manipulate Everyman ire in India. Systemic rot makes small things in our lives difficult and dreary. Director Prakash Jha and Anjum Rajabali, his co-writer in Satyagaraha, prop their film on that very saleable idea. Obviously inspired by the mutinous Anna Hazare wave that gripped the country last year, they write a high-pitched, anti-establishment drama. Mob hysteria is black and white, and in a film, it can go terribly wrong unless real characters behind the hysteria are delineated with imagination. There are no real characters in Satyagraha, only simplistic, representative figures drumming up relentless noise.

Set in a fictional town, Amitabh Bachchan plays the lead of Dadu, a former school teacher and a Gandhian, who loses his son in an accident. Predictably, he is against commerce and alcohol. An impulsive action puts him in jail and the son's friend Manav (Ajay Devgn) engineers a movement to free him using social media and a TV journalist Yasmin (Kareena Kapoor). A national revolution ensues. A local politician (Arjun Rampal), supposedly an outlaw, who has his tricks of working around the system, joins in without any persuasion. The scheming politician they are directly up against has the familiar neta attributes, played effectively by Manoj Bajpai.

Amitabh Bachchan plays a Gandhian in the film
In more than 150 minutes of its running time, same scenes and situation repeat, just for the sake of rousing the tempo, leading up to an unbelievably facile climax. Add to this noise, songs with lyrics like "janta rocks, janta talks" set to very ordinary beats, and Satyagraha becomes a travesty.
Jha is more a pamphleteer rather than a director here. Besides the blinkered view on the politics of the common man, he is surprisingly blind to some film-making basics. Lighting by cinematographer Sachin Krishn could suit a TV soap opera. Editing is slack. The production design of this film is so poor, that even if there are some weighty scenes and some snatches of moving performances, you are unlikely to notice them.

Devgn ropes in Kapoor to help engineer a movement to free Bachchan
Bachchan's restrained histrionics, his looming presence and the baritone lend some restorative gravitas to the underdeveloped character he plays. Devgn's Manav gets equal importance in the story, but again, it is a character with a linear tone and graph, and Devgn does not add extra weight to it"depending on one or two expressions throughout the film. Kapoor as the journalist who joins the fold of the activists, Rampal as the politician who conforms much too easily and Amrita Rao as Dadu's daughter-in-law are bland and uninspired. The story demands nothing out of this star cast. Bajpai's crook politician has some clever lines and he plays the role with enough zest.
Satyagraha is a missed opportunity. By translating a phenomenon that captured the national imagination even fleetingly, it could have humanized the Anna brigade. Jha dumbs down, and does it artlessly.

Critics' review: watch Satyagraha for performances
Sweta Kaushal, Hindustantimes.com
New Delhi, August 30, 2013

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First Published: 16:00 IST(30/8/2013)
Last Updated: 16:30 IST(30/8/2013)Share
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Prakash Jha's upcoming multi-starer Satyagraha " Democracy Under Fire is said to be inspired from the recent anti-corruption movement that brought political discussions out of our drawing rooms right to the streets. We bring you pictures from the political thriller. Amitabh Bachchan, Kareena Kapoor, Ajay Devgn, Arjun Rampal and Amrita Rao feature in the movie, apart from other prominent names. (Photo Courtesy: Facebook)
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Satyagraha hits the theatres today. The film starring Amitabh Bachchan, Kareena Kapoor, Arjun Rampal, Amrita Rao and Manoj Bajpai is a dialogue with the youth of today, Prakash Jha said at most of his promotional events.

The director picked a rather new (as compared to last week's

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political thriller Madras Cafe) subject for Satyagraha.

Although the director claimed that his movie is not based on the Anna Hazare movement, most reports suggested otherwise. With a topic like that, Prakash Jha helming the project and actors like Amitabh Bachchan, Ajay Devgn and Manoj Bajpai - the expectations were sky-high. Prakash Jha, however, could not live up to the expectations, at least for most critics.

Saibal Chatterjee writes for NDTV, "Prakash Jha's Satyagraha is a political film that, for all its well-meaning bluster, neither stings nor scalds. It fails to hit the core of the truth that it seeks," and further elaborates, "Unfortunately, Satyagraha barely skims the surface of a complex theme, leaving many a crucial question unanswered. As a result, it can hardly be expected to shake a vast nation and its somnolent rulers out of their torpor."



Saurabh Dwivedi writes for India Today, "The movie is replete with the old tried-and-tested formulae - including item numbers - which also helps explains why the movie lost ground."

Saibal Chatterjee writes, "A problem that has beset Jha's recent films is back to haunt Satyagraha as well. The principal characters do not converse like you and me. They make speeches from a rostrum. When they are not letting out hot air from a pedestal, they deliver grand statements of intent to each other and everyone within earshot. It is an approach that is better suited to street theatre than to the big screen."

Sarit Tanwar writes for DNA, "You can't make a film about what is wrong with the system, while surrendering to the system. It is a cop-out. Satyagraha could have been so much more had it taken the Madras Cafe route and made an honest, hard-hitting film. The bollywood-isation of the film is what ruins it."

The actors have, interestingly, impressed the critics with performances.



Saurabh Dwivedi writes, "When it comes to cinema, its truth is equally divided amongst the three monkeys - story, acting and direction. What the movie lost out in story and direction, it made up for with acting. The movie's saving grace was Amitabh Bachchan, Manjoj Bajpai and somehow managing to secure the third spot on this list, Ajay Devgn."

Srijana Mitra Das writes for Times Of India, "Devgn is Satyagraha's strong body while Amitabh - gaunt in grief, moving in fortitude - is its soul. And Bajpai is its glittering, malevolent cloak, delivering a satiny performance hair-raising in its perfection. Bachchan voices the movie's philosophy - "Janta sarkaar ki malik hai. Malik nirdesh deta hai. Maang nahin karta."

Sarit Tanwar sums up, "There is enough anger/frustration amongst people, if Satyagraha's purpose was to remind us that nothing changed even after the movement, the rallies and the noise on the social network, it succeeds."

Film critic Mayank Shekhar (W14) agrees, "At some point, you hear yourself go, "Ab bas bahut ho gaya yar. Bandh karo bak bak." We get a lot of this on TV anyway, and at least we know what's going on there."

Tweetspeak:
@SRKsGurl: Just read NDTV reveiw if #Satyagraha now regretting why did take the ticket in advance.. I wilk have to watch #ChennaiExpress this weekend:)

@reachrummana: There are no easy solutions in a country like India and #Satyagraha brings to fore the many issues

@VikasAgarwalll: Issuing Fatwa to all AB, Ajay, Arjun, Manoj, Kareena fans & AAP workers to watch #Satyagraha this weekend ! :P

@nishantshekhar1: Satyagrah just mocks Team Anna movement..poor direction...worst climax..and bad casting...watch it only for Manoj Bajpayee.

Have you watched the movie? Share your views in the comment box below.

taran adarsh @taran_adarsh 2h

#Satyagraha opens to a strong word of mouth in UAE-GCC. Thu AED 430,000. Few screens yet to report. Bigger start than #Raajneeti.

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Finally some good news😃

Originally posted by: BeShArAm

Satyagraha review: Why Amitabh Bachchan can't save the deadly bore fest

by Piyasree Dasgupta Aug 30, 2013

Before anything else, I would like to take this opportunity to express my heartfelt gratitude to Prakash Jha. Henceforth, I shall walk on Mumbai's streets wearing a gas mask and will shun chewing gums, burgers, proximity to loud speakers, high heels or any such thing that threatens the beautiful gift of life. I might also be cajoled enough to have broccoli, whose place in my life was just a notch above Aditya Pancholi and vegan dahi till now. Because Satyagraha was indeed a life-changing experience " watching it was the closest I had come to dying from self-pity over bad choices made in life, of ear-drum scarring and of boredom. Yes, it was one of those occasions you realise boredom can be fatal.

Okay, now that I have gotten this important bit of acknowledgement out of my way, let's get to the film. Satyagraha is set in a small town called Ambikapur. You know, like small towns in Bollywood are. There's a chowk where a mad man with dreadlocks says clever things. Where boys and girls talk to each other from balconies, because, you know, talking on the phone is not small towney enough. Where schoolmasters are not human beings " they talk like mutants programmed to the preamble of India's Constitution.

In that village, corporate honcho Ajay Devgn arrives for the wedding of his childhood friend Akhilesh, a civil engineer employed with the government. The former wants all the corporate goodies while the latter wants to make great roads. The latter also has a nightmare of a father called Dwarka Anand. He the father we all have dreaded having " one who ticks off your friends, one who associates immorality of character with alcohol and oh god, one who speaks like he lives in a desh bachao street-play. So, Dwarka catches Manav (Devgn) plying sonny boy with alcohol and sends him packing. Now, Dwarka-Manav are officially as friendly as Shashi Tharoor and Narendra Modi.


Three years pass by and Devgn is spotted taking in the cleavages of various women " a white dancer in a posh Delhi bar who is strangely dressed in a skimpy ghagra choli and Mugdha Godse in a miss-before-you-can-blink role. The company of women generous with their necklines and a bunch of men, generous with their paunches, is supposed to establish that Manav is now a bad, bad corporate big shot. We're told he is planning to launch some mobile phone network. Sorry, we couldn't catch the name of the company because that's when Kareena Kapoor appears in the film. Kapoor is a bad ass journalist. She carries an iPad and thrusts it in the faces of corrupt ministers who she had caught doing unethical stuff on sting operations. She is as dreaded in the political circles as a railway strike is in Mumbai. And amid all that back breaking news reporting her hair doesn't stop looking less blow dried, less curled at the right places and less shampoo-ad gorgeous! How bad ass is that?

Akhilesh, on the other hand, was making great roads and flyovers enough to convince his father that at that rate, the country would beat China in development. Don't ask how building flyovers in one small town in Bihar gives a virulent idealist such an impression " that kind of idealism follows processes as secret as Rahul Gandhis speech writing sessions. It is not meant for the understanding of puny mortals.

However, tragedy strikes Ambikapur soon after. A flyover Akhilesh built collapses killing seven labourers and the engineer himself gets run over by a truck a day after. The local government announces a compensation of Rs 25 lakh. However, they forget their promise and Akhilesh' widow is left running pillar to post trying to get the compensation, with which she wants to open a school. One day, insulted by the district collector she returns home weeping. The father-in-law, in the true tradition of the fire-brand idealist walks to the district magistrate's office and greets him with one tight slap. Understandably, old man lands in jail. Manav comes running and after trying to hand wring the man's release, he launches a social campaign to release him. His tool? Social media. So there's a Facebook page seeking the release of Daduji'. Twitter campaign and ace journalist Yasmin (Kareena Kapoor) dumps an assignment to interview the Prime Minister and lands in Ambikapur to cover the revolution.

A lot of mind-numbing things follow. Daduji is released, the campaign against corruption gets bigger, and the whole of Ambikapur wants evil minister Balaram Singh (Manoj Vajpayee) out of their lives and this world. When it doesn't happen easily, Daduji, goes on a hunger-strike.

And all the while Daduji grovels his way through the ordeal, you wonder how he is still not dead. No, not because he is 70 and has had no food. But because there's this bunch of annoying kids who have stationed themselves in front of him singing something called Janta Rocks, Janta Talks'. I refrain from calling it a song, because Robin Thicke, Altaf Raza and Priyanka Chopra seem like valid singers after you've heard that thing. That thing sounds something like one neighbour screaming about another's dog taking a leak on his boundary wall. That thing sounds like a sales meeting where no one's met the target. That thing sounds like, yes, the Lok Sabha in its elements! How the frail, unfed seventy-year-old doesn't die from either that or the knowledge that the people around him are turning up in crisp colour coordinated Nehru jackets and shampooed, scrupulously styled hair while he suffers, is a mystery bigger than Amrita Rao's role in the film.

What is even more terrible than showing a public movement against the administration is one that is manipulated by one shrewd person is how juvenile it makes mass outrage look. And at times, completely hilarious. Because the participants in Jha's public movements are give dialogues that seem like answers to high school political science questions. You'd imagine from Jha's film that the country is only full of boys who have Swami Vivekanand's posters on their bedroom walls, and not Katrina Kaif's.

And ah, the acting. Ajay Devgn manages to look like he has severe stomach trouble through the film " when he is hurt, when he is angry, when he is about to have sex with a super hot woman. Kareena Kapoor pouts like she is in a Vivel ad and looks all around here with the amusement of an expat who has just seen a cow at a traffic signal. Amitabh Bachchan could have done this film in his sleep " seems like that's what he did.

that bad?

Originally posted by: koiza.k

that bad?

I only found two positive reviews apart from Taran adarsh and TOI till now

So might be

looks like kareena is going to give some good competition to kattys jthj role/performance.

'Satyagraha' Timely Wakeup Call for a Wounded Nation
Friday, 30 August 2013, 05:42 Hrs
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Film: "Satyagraha"; Cast: Amitabh Bachchan, Ajay Devgn, Kareena Kapoor, Arjun Rampal, Manoj Bajpayee, Amrita Rao; Director: Prakash Jha; Rating: ****

Prakash Jha's "Satyagraha" bears no thematic relation to any of his earlier political dramas. It is certainly not a sequel to his "Raajneeti", as has been reported in some sections of the media. And yes, it is most certainly based on the movement that Anna Hazare started against corruption. To say that Mr. Bachchan's character Dwarka Anand in "Satyagraha", lovingly called Dadujee by one and all, and Dadujee's turbulent relationship with the go-getting NRI-turned-Gandhian-nationalist Maanav Raghvendra(Devgn) does not bear a resemblance to the Anna Hazare-Arvind Kejriwal equation, would be plain blindness.

What Jha and his very able astute and politically informed co-writer and long-time collaborator Anjum Rajabali have done, is to collect together the thematic threads of Anna Hazare's mass anti-corruption movement and weave it into a gripping, thoughtful, hard-hitting and inspirational drama which contains all the resonances of a newspaper headline, and wrap it up in the semantics of cinema with as little creative violence as possible even while addressing an inherently violent issue.

From the time Jha made his intensely political drama "Damul", there has been a constant strife between the director's personal political ideology and its rendition into cinematically interpreted language. Drama and emotions have always been Jha's bete noire. In his predominantly brutal domain of interpersonal politics, the human drama is played out austerely, often at the cost of squandering away the chance to draw the characters' innerscape in an elaborately-charted scheme .

In Jha's "Aarakshan", we had seen that trademark emotional austerity in the way he portrayed Mr. Bachchan's relationship with his screen-daughter Deepika Padukone. In "Satyagraha", one feels the relationship between Mr. Bachchan's character and his widowed daughter-in-law (Amrita Rao) could have gone a little further. But then Mr. Bachchan is the kind of extraordinary actor who can say so much about his character's emotional environment in the most meagre playing-time. Here, he has that one moment with Amrita Rao when hearing her sob in the dead of the night, he goes into her room to console her... And we know the kind of deep bonding this powerful patriarch shares with his cruelly widowed Bahu.

Movie Review: 'Satyagraha' is relevant but lacks impact
Satyagraha's idealism teeters on corniness
By Nikhil Kumar
Fri, Aug 30, 2013 06:06:34 GMT






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The ApunKaChoice movie review of Satyagraha. Such has the state of affairs in apna mahaan Bharat come to be today that something seems amiss if a new scam doesn't pop up after every few days. Corrupt politicians have always been around, but with the whistleblowers getting bumped off mysteriously, honest officials handed prompt suspensions, and bureaucratic red-tape getting thicker than ever, the morale of the aam admi has gone the way of the rupee -- DOWN. In such a lamentably bleak scenario, the only sliver of hope the aam admi can have is from...who else?...himself/herself. Filmmaker Prakash Jha's latest conscience prickler Satyagraha chronicles the tale of one such revolution fashioned by the aam admi.

Dwarka Anand (Amitabh Bachchan) is a former teacher, a Gandhian and an unshakable idealist. His honest engineer son Akhilesh (Indraneil Sengupta) dies on duty and his widowed daughter-in-law (Amrita Rao) never gets to see the compensation money promised by the corrupt Balram Singh (Manoj Bajpayee), the state home minister of Ambikapur. Dwarka Anand's frustration finds its vent in the apt form of a tight slap he lands on a government official, backed with an equally apt lesson, "Naukar hain aap janta ke, aur badtameezi bardasht nahin karenge hum." Consequence: Dwarka Anand is put behind bars.

An act of political arrogance enough to rattle the conscience of Manav Raghavendra (Ajay Devgn), an NRI telecom magnate and friend of the dead engineer son of Dwarka Anand. Manav is a corporate man with unflinching greed, ambition and aim to have billions in his bank balance. Whatever the ideological differences between him and Dwarka Anand, he can't sleep over the old man's plight in the lock-up. So he galvanizes a movement. Through social media and direct contact with aam admi, he puts a spark in the tinderbox of the janta's frustration against injustice and corruption.

What begins as a ragtag protest turns into a full-blown revolution with the other players like Arjun Singh (Arjun Rampal) -- a hotheaded youth leader and wannabe bahubali not averse to using violence to get his right' done -- and the dauntless journalist Yasmin Ahmed (Kareena Kapoor) stepping into the fray.

The groundswell of support the quintet muster, Dwarka's fast-unto-death, and how the public braves the water cannons and lathis calls to mind the Anna Hazare movement of 2011, that shook the citadels of Indian democracy and sent the politicians in a scurry to pass a sense of the house resolution' on Jan Lokpal that has eventually and expectedly come to nothing. In Satyagraha, Prakash Jha and his writer Anjum Rajabali choose a less subtle and more physical denouement with Manav getting one-on-one with the wimpy Balram.

The movie also calls to our corrosive memory the other headline grabbing scams (2G, Mining), controversies and candlelight protests we've seen over the years and they haven't been few by any stingy count.

Yet, Satyagraha is not a film without its flaws. The idealism of the quintet almost teeters on the brink of corniness. All the talk of morals, principles and ideals loses its sting after a while because Prakash Jha and Anjum Rajabali make their characters converse in a turgid language of lofty words an aam aadmi seldom uses in real life and can't relate to. Also, the romantic-sensual number "Raske Bhare Tore Nain" between Ajay Devgn and Kareena Kapoor Khan popping up in all the seriousness of the plot is an aberration, not to mention how visibly ill-at-ease KKK is when Devgn locks her in his tight embrace.

To his credit Jha pulls off a few dramatic moments with aplomb. The scene when Amitabh Bachchan's Dwarka Anand visits the site of his son's death, or an interaction between Ajay Devgn and Amitabh can make you reach for the kerchiefs.

Satyagraha rests on the able shoulders of Amitabh Bachchan and Ajay Devgn, and both the actors deliver competently even though Bachchan's Dwarka Anand looks and sounds cannily similar to the partly namesake teacher Prabhakar Anand from Jha's Aarakshan. Manoj Bajpayee shines as the smirking, cunning and irrevocably corrupt minister who sees politics as business. Kareena Kapoor Khan is nearly creditable as an omnipresent journalist except when she's giving intense expressions when hit by water cannons. Amrita Rao and Arjun Rampal chip in well for their parts.

Prakash Jha has got his finger on the pulse of the people, and convincingly portrays the angst of the common man in Satyagraha. But his noble intentions are done in by the abundant idealistic flourish he imbues the film with.

Rating: ***

Satyagraha: This revolution does not awaken anyone
By Shilpa Jamkhandikar August 30, 2013
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amitabh bachchan | anna hazare | movie review | Prakash Jha | satyagraha

(Any opinions expressed here are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters)

In "Satyagraha", director Prakash Jha attempts to show a divided society and the chasm between the people and their leaders.

But Jha seems to give in to the same kind of consumerism and greed that his film's holier-than-thou characters look down on.

Amitabh Bachchan plays Dwarka Anand, a retired teacher and an idealist. Soon after the film opens, he berates his son's friend for promoting a capitalistic lifestyle. Anand accuses the new generation of being greedy and having selfish desires that encourage corruption.

Within minutes, a character asks another if a packet of India Gate rice has been opened. Another extols the virtues of UltraTech Cement. How can you make a film that criticises certain values and promotes them in the same breath?

Jha sets out to make a film based on the 2011 anti-corruption movement by Gandhian activist Anna Hazare, adding references to the Satyendra Dubey murder case and homilies about a corrupt government battling outraged citizens whose only weapons seem to be hashtags on social media.

"Satyagraha" is a film about a rot in politics but Jha gives little importance to the specifics of the system or how it works.

In the film, Dwarka Anand wants the government to clear pending claims and petitions within a month, assuming naively they are genuine and do not need any checks. He wants an ordinance he hasn't even bothered to draft and goes on a hunger strike. The audience never knows what his demands are.

Filmmaker Jha seems to think the issues are peripheral; all he apparently cares for is the potential melodrama.

Anand's revolution takes place in a small town called Ambikapur. Manav (Ajay Devgn), the boy Anand had scolded in the beginning, joins the campaign after a change of heart that sees him give up a 60 billion rupee business empire. Local leader Arjun (Arjun Rampal) is the movement's muscle power but doesn't do much except shout slogans and sing on stage.

We also have Yasmin (Kareena Kapoor), a firebrand reporter who has obviously not heard of something called conflict of interest. Yasmin stays in the house of the man she is covering for the story, offers advice and is often on stage during speeches and hunger strikes " blurring the line between reporting and being the story herself.

There are item songs (even a rock song called "Janata rocks" which plays intermittently), a love story and a hurriedly cobbled together conclusion that doesn't solve any of the problems.

Jha is lucky he has a stellar cast that pulls off the most ridiculous scenes. Bachchan towers over everyone but Devgn and Manoj Bajpayee (the evil politician) keep up with him. Kapoor preens more than she acts while Rampal doesn't have much of a role.

"Satyagraha" is at best a dull film that doesn't grip you. Look a little deeper and it's a reminder of how little has changed about the way Bollywood makes movies and why it makes them.

(Follow Shilpa on Twitter @shilpajay)