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Critics’ Verdict: ‘Padmaavat’ Is Powered by Ranveer’s Performance

Most critics concur that Ranveer Singh makes for a charismatic monster in Bhansali’s ‘Padmaavat’.

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Film: Padmaavat
Director: Sanjay Leela Bhansali
Cast: Deepika Padukone, Ranveer Singh, Shahid Kapoor

Excerpts from reviews of Padmaavat:

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Through a simplistic and conventional chronicle of domestic calm ruined by foreign invasion, Bhansali explores his pet predilections and gives his current muse, Ranveer Singh, the role of a lifetime. The movie’s working title was Padmavati, after its titular queen, but its most memorable character is Singh’s kohl-eyed degenerate. Singh, acting as much with his body as his face, ensures that his Khijli both repels and attracts....In Bhansali’s clinically ordered world, in which honour resides in the Rajputs and evil in the Khilji camp, the disruptive outsider loses the battle but wins the war.
Nandini Ramnath, Scroll
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If there’s one thing that keeps us from brooding too much through the film, it is Ranveer Singh. Not once does he try to make us like him, and that makes us like him even more. As a performer, he has always been unpredictable, in a good way. As Bhansali’s Khilji, he is electric. And try as anyone might, so is the attraction between the outsider and the queen: it is their doomed love story, whose embers rain on the screen, that we take away with us. Take that, senas.
Shubhra Gupta, The Indian Express
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Ranveer bites into this character like Khilji chews into meat – did I mention that he also lacks table manners. Khilji is repellent but you can’t look away. His king-size nastiness infuses vigour into the film. Ranveer chews the scenery with aplomb and yet the first half of Padmaavat remains listless.
Anupama Chopra, The Film Companion
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Ranveer Singh breathes life into the character of the barbaric, power-drunk Alauddin, giving us a villain for the ages. Shrewd, oversexed, unrelenting, and eccentric, his Alauddin is a portrait of menace, and the most compelling character in the film. He plays the part with the sort of grotesque flamboyance that makes it hard to look at anyone or anything else when he’s on the screen. Sporting unkempt waist-length hair, kohl in those piercing eyes, facial scars, and the sex-appeal and swagger of a badboy rockstar, he’s both fascinating and repulsive at once. Alaudddin finds a loyal ally in Malik Gafoor (Jim Sarbh in good form), who indulges his perversities and reveals an equally cruel heart himself. Some of their moments together are pure gold.
Rajeev Masand, News18
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Singh’s seething performance is, at best, an unhinged parody of a nutjob villain; at the very least, it’s lively...this film may as well have been called “Khilji”.
Uday Bhatia, Mint Lounge
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(Source: Scroll, The Indian Express, News18, The Film Companion)

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