A thug falls in love with a woman, who sparks in him newfound feelings of kindness and empathy. But the girl’s parents don’t warm up to this relationship. In the end, though, their love conquers all.
If this storyline of Hero, a new Bollywood movie, sounds familiar, it should. In the 1980s, a film of the same name with a similar storyline starring Jacky Shroff and Meenakshi Sheshadri was made. But then Hero could just as well be a remake of any other Bollywood film, for this worn-out plot is a favourite among less creative writers.
What’s more, Hero abounds with unrealistic dialogues and actions. You need only go through the first few minutes to reach this conclusion. In one of the scenes, a man at a disco misbehaves with his girlfriend, the heroine Radha (Athya Shetty) to whose dramatic rescue comes the movie’s protagonist Sooraj (Sooraj Pancholi). The goon is inevitably flanked by his comic gang-mates.
Radha’s father, a policeman, is fighting a case against an accused murderer named Pasha, and it so happens that Sooraj is Pasha’s protégé. Talk about contrivances. Sooraj obliges when Pasha asks him to abduct Radha. In the guise of a policeman, he tells her that she is in danger and takes her away. Eventually, the two fall in love while Radha is held in captivity at a small house in Kashmir. Radha still doesn’t know that Sooraj is a goon, not a policeman. It is only later that she finds out but is seemingly unbothered by this fact.
Meanwhile, Radha’s family wishes for her to be married to another man, but entangled as she in a web of lies, she avoids getting married. All softened up, Sooraj opens a gym and starts a fresh life away from the gundas, but so far, he is still unappreciated by Radha’s family.
For much of the movie, we fail to feel what the characters feel. Athya Shetty is most expressionless, even as she is asked to leave her boyfriend behind in jail and go to Paris. Nor does the movie go into any depth into the complexities of its characters. The pair almost always have a good time, drinking and looking at starry skies. What else?
To be fair, in his debut movie, Sooraj Pancholi does bring into his dialogues and expressions the poignancy that different situations call for. He evokes sympathy from us, caught as he is between his loyalty to his Baba (Pasha) and his girlfriend. The movie does well in its decision not to dramatise this conflict, though: Radha seems not to be asking him to make any sort of difficult choices. That gives this movie a (brief) breath of fresh air.
Besides these, there is not much else to look forward to in the movie. Hero is strikingly familiar and fails to give its audience anything new at all, except its debutant stars, Pancholi and Shetty.