Take a dramatic Bollywood love story and crash land it into an adrenaline-pumping fight movie, and you have Baaghi. With soft emotions and hard knock outs interrupting each other, the Tiger Shroff-Shraddha Kapoor movie is jarring. Baaghi is a mix of Rumble in the Bronx and the Protector, but in the wrong proportions. It uses the space like the former and sensibilities of the latter. Action sequences lack thoughtful choreography, and thus everything comes down to Tiger’s flexibility. In addition to it, he is also expected to play a hardcore Bollywood lover. The saving grace is the exotic locales, from Kerala’s backwaters to Krabi, there’s plenty eye candy to soothe the sore screenplay. But you still have to deal with the ugly bones being broken in the 133- minute film. In short, The Karate Kid enters Bloodsport and appears in a hurry to become Ong-Bak without losing the essential Bollywood qualities. Baaghi shines only in patches.

The action in the film deserves a standing ovation. When the trailer of Baaghi hit the web, what outshone all else in it was the kind of action Tiger Shroff and Shraddha Kapoor were seen gifting viewers with. Sabbir Khan's Baaghi, true to its trailer, is mostly about action than anything else. In fact, it is so much of action that after a point of time you lose track of the story altogether.  Sabbir Khan and Sanjeev Dutta's story is very patchy. It gives viewers several enjoyable moments but is excruciatingly painful to sit through the entire duration of the film. The one aspect where Baaghi wins big is the cinematography. Binod Pradhan's camera is adept at capturing the Vallam Kali (the boat race festival in Kerala) with equal ease as the fight-club sequences in Bangkok. Songs like Agar Tu Hota and Chham Chham are hummable. Overall, the music is not quite impactful, but not intolerable either. Watch Baaghi this week if you want to whistle along to Tiger and Shraddha's bone-breaking punches.

The makers of Baaghi - the writer and the director, two separate but obviously like-minded entities - seem to believe that it is perfectly all right to rebel against reason, logic and good sense. Without a credible screenplay to hold it together, this 140-minute action film can only heap endless misery on moviegoers who detest meaningless bone-crunching. Low on genuine emotion, Baaghi is only as engaging as a badly designed video game. The love story is interspersed with flashy martial arts action scenes, but given a male lead who is hard pressed to convince us that he has a genuine grouse against the world, the crass concoction simply does not get off the ground. The insipid acting all around does not help the cause of this wayward rebel one bit.  Baaghi is eminently avoidable. Keep out of its path.

First half of Tiger Shroff, Shraddha Kapoor film is enjoyable. When we come upon him first in his second film, ‘Baaghi’, we see Tiger Shroff upside down, balancing his full weight on a thumb and forefinger. It is an impressive sight, to see someone so fit, so agile, so much in command of his body. Post interval, there’s a sharp slide. Shraddha Kapoor is slender and pretty and executes both the ‘chham chham’ in the rain as well as some roundhouse kicks and punches well enough, but is fashioned like a Bollywood heroine belonging to the potboilers of the 70s and 80s.  Why does a film with a new hero, who can reveal a beautifully muscled chest, and do such jaw-dropping stunts, not go for broke and create freshness all around? I enjoyed the first half, and yawned through the much-too-long-drawn second.