On demand: "Singham"

A franchise-launching hit in the summer of 2011, Rohit Shetty's Hindi police procedural Singham - a remake of a Tamil success from the previous year - has Ajay Devgn as the last good cop in Goa, a character helpfully defined for us in the lyrics of a thumping opening theme song: "He's a child at heart/Mischievous and fun/But if you cross him/You will feel his wrath." Crossing him on this occasion: a gleefully corrupt construction boss (Prakash Jha), who within the first ten minutes has confessed to his underlings that he's murdered a child with his own bare hands. It is, then, an open-and-shut case - you could switch it off after those ten minutes, confident you knew exactly where it was heading, and that you'd be in for a far more edifying evening's entertainment doing almost anything else - so Shetty stuffs the two hours between credits and conclusion with dumb-as-nuts action and broad pantomimic comedy: supporting characters who make crank calls in funny voices, grown men getting hit on the head with coconuts. Playing everything as a joke enables it (and us) not to take any of the corruption, injustice and police brutality we witness too seriously: the whole is not unlike watching an episode of Law & Order if the franchise had fallen not to conservative master tactician Dick Wolf but Adam Sandler and Rob Schneider.

It's almost transcendentally basic, and you can sort of see why it became a hit. Set out in bright, warm colours that mimic the film stocks of old - this Goa's grass is a shade of green only experienced on LSD trips - it does nothing to challenge or complicate its vision of "righteous cop cleans up the streets"; while in some respects a throwback to the mass cinema of yore, it actually plays as far less nuanced than certain Hindi crime movies of the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties. Shetty's route-one camerawork does all the heavy lifting, establishing an off-kilter world in a flurry of Dutch angles before approaching the hero at knee height and gazing adoringly upwards. With his matinee-idol 'tache, Devgn certainly looks dashing kicking ass in a vest and taking his belt to his foes' backsides - you can well imagine matinee mums and grannies swooning - but the mischief and fun promised in that first song go AWOL along the way; instead, key scenes are stolen by Jha, reprising his role from the original, and seemingly having a blast playing a character with no redeeming features whatsoever. Some solid car- and person-flipping stuntwork, but much of it borders on the braindead, and it makes the average Fast & Furious movie of this period seem like James Ellroy.

Singham is available to rent via Prime Video, along with its sequel Singham Returns; a third film in the series, Singham Again, opens in selected cinemas today, and will be reviewed here in due course.