‘Kesari’ Critics’ Review: Strong Action But Poor Storytelling

Is ‘Kesari’ just another star vehicle for Akshay?

Film: Kesari
Director: Anurag Singh
Cast: Akshay Kumar, Parineeti Chopra

Read excerpts of reviews from Kesari here:

Anurag Singh and co-writer Girish Kohli have no excuse to botch up the material, but they do so anyway. Sluggishly paced until the interval and springing to life only in fits and starts in the second half, Kesari is a poor attempt to revisit a chapter in Indian military history that earned the admiration even of British colonisers and is celebrated to this day in Punjab.  

Nandini Ramnath, Scroll

Kumar is in complete control of his craft here. He infuses his Ishar Singh with a touch of empathy and kindness and is completely immersed in his character. In fact, under his mop beard and stocky frame (his get-up tailors him into a rather burly form), his effort to alter his body language and pitch is evident yet not laboured. Parineeti Chopra, who play’s Singh’s significant other in the film, is resigned to a cameo and has barely enough of a role to deserve a mention.  

Kunal Guha, Mumbai Mirror

Let’s not kid ourselves. Kesari, starring who else but Akshay Kumar in a well-shampooed fake beard, might be marketed as a celebration of valour and bravery and all those patriotic hashtag terms guiding Indian filmmakers since 2014. But this godawful movie merely uses history as a ruse to continue Hindi cinema’s fetishization of violence. For no less than 80 minutes out of the film’s 150 (if not for the slow-motion shots, Kesari might have run at 21 minutes), bullets smash through skulls, chests, waists, butts, hands and eyes. Bodies are gleefully impaled onto multiple swords while a swelling background score and Jasleen Royal’s disturbingly young voice pepper a bonfire of corpses.  

Rahul Desai, Film Companion