Raid 2

The Burden of the Righteous

I'm not sure when Ajay Devgn decided to reduce his acting to angles and posture, but it’s oddly effective. In *Raid 2*, he’s back as Amay Patnaik, the perpetually unimpressed IRS officer whose moral rigidity seems to warp his every movement. He strolls through rooms with squared-off shoulders and night-time sunglasses, carrying the fatigue of a man whose only passion is doing the right thing. It’s a very precise kind of screen presence. (You half expect him to block a breeze for being improperly taxed.) Seven years after the first movie kept us trapped inside a claustrophobic mansion, director Raj Kumar Gupta tries to fling the windows open, expanding the story from a localized tax fight to a sprawling political game.



Gupta clearly wants to tackle systemic rot, shifting the setting to the city of Bhoj and giving Patnaik a much bigger beast to go after. The original *Raid* worked like a pressure cooker, relying on the geography of a single house. This sequel aims for the grandeur of a civic epic. I’m just not convinced the story machinery is up for the task. The script keeps trying to juggle old-school populist heroics with dense bureaucratic procedure, and the joins begin to show. As Ishita Sengupta pointed out for OTTplay, “The apolitical stance of Raj Kumar Gupta's Raid 2 backfires on the commentary it tries to make; its cautious intent and framing shrink the story's broad scope into the smallness of a single act.” The movie wants the righteous fury of a political thriller without ever pointing at any real political power.



The film truly comes alive when it zeroes in on the villain. Riteish Deshmukh is Dadabhai, a self-made politician who masks his corruption with a facade of charity. Deshmukh’s career has thrived on manic comedy, so the measured restraint he shows here lands. Watch him in public—his movements are slow and deliberate, calibrated for the sycophants around him. He gets the value of soft power. When he washes his mother’s feet for the cameras to project the image of a pious son, his eyes stay flat, calculating. Deshmukh gives him a quiet fury that makes the eventual clashes with Patnaik quietly electric.



The second half wobbles, though. The plot suddenly starts serving up convenient wins instead of building tension. Patnaik begins unearthing proof and allies exactly when the story demands, which weakens Dadabhai’s menace. Random song breaks interrupt the cat-and-mouse rhythm just as it hits its stride, and Vaani Kapoor is stuck in a part that mostly has her waiting for her husband to save the country. Still, the climax delivers a messy kind of joy. Legend has it veteran writer Salim Khan casually suggested the ending over lunch with the director: instead of the hero being cornered, he should fling the recovered cash from a balcony to the eager mob below. When Devgn actually does it—tossing the loot while announcing it belongs to the public—it’s gloriously absurd. A wild fantasy of redistribution. But watching the crowd scramble for that tangible embodiment of dirty money, I couldn’t help but grin. Sometimes what’s needed is just a blunt instrument.