Bhaiyya Ji Review: This Manoj Bajpayee movie is a huge disappointment

How bad can a movie be? No rating measure is enough to describe the horrid Bhaiyya Ji- actor Manoj Bajpayee's latest. After watching the movie, the first question that I wanted to ask director Apoorv Singh Karki is "Why?" The second question is, "How on earth did Bajpayee agree to play this role?" 

In 2024, Bhaiyya Ji is a mix and match of all the 90s potboilers, where there is a hero who has lost one of his dear ones and as a result, he's forced to bring his ruthlessness self back and can go to any extent for revenge. There is action, gore, a weeping mother, and mean rich villain and his evil son. 

What is Bhaiyya Ji About?

Set in Bihar and Delhi, the movie revolves around a man called Ram (Manoj Bajpayee), a respectable person in his area who is about to get married. Wedding preparations are in full swing when his younger brother Vedant, while returning home, gets killed outside a New Delhi railway station. While it was initially projected as an accident, it is later revealed that Vedant has been brutally murdered by a group of drunk boys led by Abhimanyu (Jatin Goswami), the son of an influential business tycoon and politician. Being the only son of a rich politician, his saat khoon are always maaf.

Ram is initially projected as a simple middle-class man, which he is not. He was once the biggest gangster, popularly known as Bhaiyya Ji, who had left the path of violence as a promise to his late father. Now, for the sake of his brother's soul, his rowdy, gory, and evil side has returned. The rest of the movie is about how he takes revenge on the evil father- son duo.

A Mind-Numbing Movie

Keep your brain in snooze mode while watching this, as you won’t need to use much of it. With everything illogical happening on screen, this type of movie requires a brain shutdown.

From the first frame, you are already aware of what is going to come next. From action to drama to the dialogues- everything feels overdramatised. At one point, it felt like an early 2000s Hindi movie, with action inspired by a South Indian movie, with melodrama from a Bhojpuri movie thrown in between.

It's tough to think of a particular scene that felt real. From the opening shot to the end, everything felt like a sham. Even the big swords and wrenches looked like props from some D-grade play.  The blood and violence shown in the movie crosses all the levels of tackiness.

No comment on the writing or the script, because it's a cut, copy, and paste of so many bad action movies. The bizarreness crossed all boundaries in the climax. The VFX and action scenes felt fabricated and were unintentionally funny.

This is the second collaboration of Apoorv Singh Karki and Manoj Bajpayee. Considering their previous work, Sirf Ek Bandaa Kaafi Hai, this movie was a big disappointment.

Manoj Bajpayee is an actor par excellence. With his prolific performances in the past, he has proved how he can make any character shine. But in this movie, it is apparent that the actor worked half-heartedly, fully aware of a wafer-thin plot and screenplay.  

It is amazing how in 2024, when cinema and story telling have evolved by leaps and bounds, Bollywood continues to present the audience with subpar movies like Bhaiyya Ji, ironically featuring one of the best actors in the country.  Before this, I watched Akshay Kumar and Tiger Shroff's Bade Miyan Chote Miyan, which like many others, failed to impress. Both movies are on the same level, but the only thing that made Ali Abbas Zafar's movie stand out was its huge budget and a glamorous set of stars. 

Forget theatres, Bhaiyya Ji is not even OTT-worthy.