Lakkadbaggha: Anshuman Jha's strong performance leads this punchy genre mashup

Of late, there have been quite a few Indian films and TV shows that have centred animals, both pets as well as from a wildlife/conservationist point of view. The SonyLiv series Pet Puraan, the Vijay Sethupathi film Mughizh, the Kannada film 777 Charlie; these stories tried to capture something distinct and powerful about pets and how we connect with them. Whereas Sherni, Junglee et al had more of a wildlife conservationist point of view. Most recently, Amar Kaushik’s Bhediya used the genre beats of a werewolf story to make a larger point about the human-animal interface.

Victor Mukherjee’s Lakadbaggha, starring Anshuman Jha and Riddhi Dogra, is perhaps the most polemic of all of these films and shows. The story of a shy, awkward martial arts instructor who’s also an animal rights vigilante by night in Kolkata, Lakadbaggha wears its messaging on its sleeve. Its screenplay does not always carry the weight of its ambitions. The setup is overly long and the resolution a little too easy, but when it works Lakadbaggha is a lot of fun. Part creature horror, part martial arts underdog story, this is a film that’s unapologetically sincere, even at the cost of sounding sanctimonious at times.

Arjun (Jha), whose late father Tarun (Milind Soman) taught him martial arts and how to stand up for himself, has become a thorn in the flesh of a Kolkata-based gang of animal traffickers, spearheaded by Aryan D’Souza (Paresh Pahuja). To complicate matters, Arjun is falling for Aryan’s sister Akshara (Riddhi Dogra), the cop who’s also gunning for Arjun’s alter ego, the ‘Boy with the Hoodie’, the vigilante who has been beating up animal traffickers by night — one night, in doing so, he rescues the titular striped hyena, who he then befriends against all odds.

Improbable as that sounds, Lakadbaggha’s slow-burn narrative makes it work, as we’re gradually introduced to the back story for all three main characters — we learn, for example, that Akshara and Aryan’s father was a disgraced forest officer. This allows us to understand how the same incident impacted these two siblings in very different ways, how it indirectly led to them choosing the divergent lives they eventually did; one becomes a smuggler, the other a cop. In one of the film’s most interesting conversations, Arjun and Aryan are talking about what it means to evolve as an animal, and whether Darwinism is a lesson for human beings as well. It doesn’t quite go as hard as it could have, but it’s a fun little scene.

The hand-to-hand combat scenes in this film are well-shot and impeccably planned. They’re some of the most enjoyable parts of the film. The director of photography here, Jean-Marc Selva, has previously shot fights for the AFC (Australian Fighting Championship), a popular mixed martial arts tournament. The stunt coordinator Kecha Khamphakdee has worked with martial arts star Tony Jaa on the film Ong Bak 2. That’s the kind of action pedigree you want in a martial arts movie, and it shows in Lakadbaggha’s hand-to-hand combat scenes. I would especially single out Khamphakdee for his fight choreography because even with the Ong Bak films, the challenge was to show the 5 ft 6 in. Tony Jaa taking down vastly larger and more muscular opponents using Muay Thai, the kickboxing-adjacent style that emphasizes knee and elbow strikes. He has exactly the same challenge here with the slightly built Anshuman Jha, and he comes through with flying colours.

At the end of the day, though, Jha is this film’s biggest draw. His performance is finely calibrated. Arjun’s social awkwardness never becomes generic gaucheness. The vulnerability never comes across as childishness. The displays of pent-up anger are expertly performed and he has clearly put in a lot of work into the physical side of his performance as well. The haircut, the vest and the poster in his room all invoke Bruce Lee, without shouting it from the rooftops or making it an outright fetish, like Ram Gopal Varma’s so-bad-it’s-good Enter the Girl Dragon.

Where the film is let down is its pacing and screenplay, especially the second half, where events move at a dizzying pace compared to the first. The tonal dissonance can feel a bit jarring at times, until Jha and Dogra bring things to parity with their performances. On the whole, this is very much a sweet-natured, enjoyable genre mashup that could have been something special with a sharper script.

Aditya Mani Jha is a Delhi-based independent writer and journalist, currently working on a book of essays on Indian comics and graphic novels.

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