By R Rijesh
Chhalaang is a 2020 Indian sports drama comedy film directed by national award winner Hansal Mehta. It stars Rajkummar Rao, Nushrat Bharucha, Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub and Saurav Shukla in the lead roles. It is produced by Ajay Devgan, Luv Ranjan, and Ankur Garg and presented by Bhushan Kumar. The film was released on 13 November 2020 on Amazon Prime Video coinciding with Diwali.
Hansal Mehta has given a light- hearted story in a long time after strong content based features. His last released web series (Scam 1992) gained immense popularity on social media.
However, Chhalaang, being an average movie, couldn’t garner the same amount of popularity as Scam. The thing about Bollywood is that they like to follow a pattern and are cautious about taking risks.
Sports dramas and sports biopics are getting massive popularity after the success of Milkha Singh. Although better sports drama have been made in the past, this movie also manages to grab the audiences’ attention. That’s probably because of its star cast. Raj Kumar Rao has been able to make a name for himself in the industry and it’s finally starting to pay off. It has a simple, little predictable, yet enjoyable plot with a good message. The story also deals with the importance of sports education and gender equality.
The first half has well- written characters and smartly written humor and the second half has well executed sports drama, although the editing was on the weaker side. The routine storyline, ordinary screenplay and its treatment and not a great climax makes it a one-time watch. The performances are brilliant. Rajkummar Rao gives a significant performance; Nushrat Bharucha gave a charming performance with her Haryanvi diction. Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub looks convincing as a competitive PT teacher. All the supporting actors like Satish Kaushik, Naman Jain and rest have also given promising performances. One of the good things about it is that it has a great ensemble cast and all of them shined.
At last, I would like to say that is a mediocre sports entertainer. Because the screenplay is a little weak, with great acting and funny dialogues this movie can be labeled as a good time pass. It has got mixed feedback from both critics and audience and got the rating of 6.8 out of 10 on IMDb.
