Yup from the moment Ranveer Singh leaps into frame chasing a pair of goons through a dhobhi ghaat while the delighted washerwomen thump their kapda in beat to the chase, you know this movie is all about him.
He is that macho-mustachioed cop with python biceps who doesn't need a vardee. His tattoo on his bulging forearm that says “Pulis”, is badge enough for him.
He was an orphan, learnt how to survive and grease his pockets and his new thaana Miramar is now his fiefdom. Simmba’s “extra large jigar” means he strikes paarivarik relations with most women he meets and he is their reliable saviour/ benefactor/ man to call at a pinch.
Ever the benevolent Simmba, helpful to women, while screwing others over for money. His extra large jigar is second only to his extra funny dialogues and catch phrase ‘mindishblowing’, that only he can deliver bang on every time. Women pop up on the screen and they quickly become his sisters, like for instance Akruti who teaches at a night school, and complains to him about a drug racket.
Then there is the college going ‘ home minister’s daughter who calls Simmba daada or older brother. He tells her - why struggle with exams when he can get her exam paper leaked? More women are helped by Simmba, by hook or by crook. What’s not to love, right ladies? We only care about the end, not the means.
And then comes Sara Ali Khan as Shagun whose voice is so powerful that it is the one thing that might overshadow Ranveer Singh himself. Only she can pull off with spunk, a business so far fetched it can make Star Wars feel real: running a catering service where women actually deliver packed tiffins to the police thana at the amazing customer to agent ratio of one lady delivery person per tiffin. The tiffin comes straight to the desk of each cop who happens to be a maama and chacha ( because Khan’s father was once a cop, ok?) and she keeps their diets in check, customising each tiffin for diabetes and weight gain.
Simmba falls for her easily. The plot is fun and bearable so far.
Until the people, whose wrong-doings he has until now turned a blind eye to, for quid pro quo, do something terrible. The drug lord called Ranade, whose dodgy business which operates from a pub ( aren’t they all dens of vice ) has two brothers, whose dirty dealings were seen by Akruti. They rape her.
The doctor at the hospital where Akruti succumbs to her injuries talks about how she was ‘ brutally raped’ and how her intestines were damaged. A grim detail that one can only associate with Nirbhaya’s death is callously co-opted into a movie plot to get the point across that now the story has taken a turn.
Akruti’s rape and murder stirs in Simmba a kind of seething anger that he has not known so far. He asks the ladies at the ‘good food’ restaurant what should be done. They all say that such rapists should be shot dead. Some say they should be halved and quartered in public. Sentiments, basically, that echo public outcry during the 16 December Nirbhaya incident.
Sentiments that become instructions for Simmba’s law-enforcer conscience. But he realises that he can’t succeed in bringing these perpetrators to justice until he takes the law into his own hands. The two rapist brothers are thrown in jail, where they reveal that they had raped Akruti because she hurt their ego by hitting them.
A furious Simmba says “main voh ego ko nikalta hoon.” Here we are with him as it is this brute power play which is the ugly force behind rape.
But soon things take a vulgar turn with Simmba’s fake mocking of the the two men in jail in order to bait them into a fake encounter.
He calls them ‘napunsak’ and impotent, and, thereby, apparently ‘incapable’ of committing a rape. It is followed by another shocker where the insulted rapists demand that a girl be ‘let into’ their cell for them to prove their mardaangi or manhood. The criminals have guns planted in their hands, and are shot dead in jail, in what is made to look like an encounter. The women (from good food) who are the witnesses, stand there mute, apparently being okay with all of it. He did it for them after all right?
And when he is about to be transferred out of Miramar station, one of them even says, “What will we do with you gone?”
Apparently, we are safe as long as there is a Simmba in our life. An extra large jigar owning macho man with a flexible conscience who will do "what is necessary" to protect us.
I’ve never had one my whole life, how did I get this far?
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