Drunk history: "Kesari Chapter 2: The Untold Story of Jallianwala Bagh"

2019's Kesari, in which the finer points of colonial history fought a losing battle with the ego of leading man Akshay Kumar, got lucky: opening before the pandemic, when these flagwavers were still deemed to be worth leaving the house for, it proved a bigger hit closer to home than abroad, but a hit nevertheless. Now we have what Wikipedia euphemistically labels a "spiritual" sequel: a project that began life as an entirely unrelated screenplay, renamed as recently as February this year - after filming was completed - to yoke it to the Kesari Cinematic Universe. We advance a quarter-century in history, shaking off original director Anurag Singh (Karan Singh Tyagi takes over), to another pivotal moment in Indian self-determination: the aftermath of the 1919 massacre at Jallianwala Bagh - India's own Peterloo or Bloody Sunday - initiated when a British command opened fire on peaceful protestors, killing somewhere between 379 and 1500 people, depending on estimates. Returned to this stark, sobering moment, as we are in Kesari Chapter 2's opening minutes, one begins to hope the newly minted franchise has toned down the grandstanding of its first instalment. At which point it cuts to a full-screen close-up of Kumar, face painted Kermit green, while narrator Vicky Kaushal extols this new character's credentials and virtues, and an electric guitar score underlines his status as, you know, a total rockstar. The film's first, keening song juxtaposes the bodies of the fallen and Kumar's upright lawyer C. Sankaran Nair while a female singer cries out "where have you gone, my saviour?"; it will end with the star cast in a hazy saffron glow, as even his onscreen opponents bow to his brilliant legal mind. Thus does history repeat itself, first as tragedy, then as abject farce.

So we have a franchise: Akshay Stirs Shit Up While Setting The Past Right. Proven facts remain visible in KC2: the appalling brutality of the massacre itself, the case brought against the Crown by Nair. Yet more often than not, you sense these facts being co-opted - conscripted, even - by a dramatisation that plays as utterly flimsy when it's not ripely overcranked; so much piffle has been applied to the past that even the proven facts start to seem piffling. It begins during the massacre itself, and the clumsy inserts of British officers all but sticking their riflebutts up the nostrils of wide-eyed young children; it persists into this script, which smacks its lips with relish whenever one of the dastardly oppressors hones into view. There they go again, harassing old ladies, tearing up crucial documents, perjuring themselves, or pointing out with a smirk that Indian citizens enjoyed the same status in the gentlemen's clubs of the Raj as dogs. (Kumar's Nair briefly offers site-specific pushback in this respect, glancing across the urinals at a peeing British adversary and gravely noting "the Empire is shrinking".) It's far from inaccurate to portray the Brits at Jallianwala Bagh as baddies - this is one of the film's more truthful generalisations, all told - but these are never especially compelling baddies. Simon Paisley Day, as the loathsome General Dyer (memo to history: bit on the nose, that), speaks a commendable amount of his own Hindi rather than submitting to the indignity of a botchjob dub, but he has only one note to play throughout: the pinched constipation of a man who hasn't opened his bowels since the Second Boer War. These aren't characters, so no real drama flows from them; they're the straw men so many nationalist arguments rely on, nailed haphazardly to the screen so as to aggravate before being cut down.

They do, however, make a perfect match for a not terribly compelling hero. By most accounts, the real Sankaran Nair was a fascinating, conflicted Establishment figure; yet the movie instead gives us Saint Akshay, whose internal struggles are instantly rendered moot by the way KC2 has been conceived, pictorialised and scored. You don't need a sentient actor in this part (and I shall take the higher ground and resist the obvious joke); shot from the right angle, in the right light, and with the orchestra cranked up to eleven as it often is here, a mop would do the job just as effectively. Ananya Panday, the Dharma discovery whom you might think would appear somewhat out of place in a 1920s courtroom (like, where's the wifi?), has a strong opening scene in which she confronts Nair, those big eyes burning with injustice; she also plays her part in the one noteworthy movie image, her pristine white robes popping out of a crowd of establishment black silk. Yet increasingly this camera regards her as somewhere between an intern and a beneficiary of Bring Your Daughter to Work Day. "We have to keep my involvement secret," Nair tells her early on, but within minutes, our guy is giving forth at the bench, and rarely thereafter stops. If he seems ill-briefed throughout, it's because the writing has little to no interest in legal strategy and the process of discovery: Nair pulls intel from the air like a conjuror does rabbits from a hat, and the sorry facts of this case matter far less than the stage the courtroom provides to make the kinds of speeches these films trade in. "How's that for a confession?," asks Kumar at one point, turning towards the camera as Axar Patel would the umpire. Alas, this just isn't cricket. The nonsense Kesari entered into the record was half-funny, in a big dumb movie way; here, it falls somewhere between exasperating and infuriating, because it reduces a meaningful story to the crassest movie slop. The star has taken the film's success on home soil to announce plans for a Kesari Chapter 3: I have an awful feeling I'm going to spend some part of the rest of my days watching Akshay Kumar Photoshopping himself into the most turbulent moments of India's history, like the world's worst Forrest Gump impersonator.

Kesari Chapter 2: The Untold Story of Jallianwala Bagh is now showing in selected cinemas.