Mission Raniganj Review: The Intrepid Engineer Played By Akshay Kumar Deserved A Much Better Film

The unprecedented rescue of 65 trapped miners by a real-life hero, a Coal India officer who put his life on the line in the process, is reenacted in Mission Raniganj, directed by Tinu Suresh Desai and written by Vipul K. Rawal. The film is marred by excesses of the kind that leave no room for addressing themes beyond the surface of things.

Mission Raniganjset in Mahabir Colliery in West Bengal’s Raniganj area, does not dig deep enough as it mines the story of Jaswant Singh Gill, an intrepid engineer whose valour is part of Indian mining folklore. The man deserved a much better film.

The film reinforces the lingering belief that Hindi cinema should leave true stories alone, especially if Akshay Kumar is to be placed at the centre of the action. Mission Raniganj suffers the deleterious consequences of the spotlight being focused on the star rather than on the issues surrounding the mining disaster.

Cast your mind back to Kala Patthar. Yash Chopra’s 1979 film, inspired mainly by the Chasnala mining tragedy from four years earlier and partly by Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim, had a disgraced Merchant Navy captain who sought redemption in the depths of the earth. The principal character and the story had layers that imparted power to the film.

Mission Raniganjwhich does have references to Chasnala in passing, has no depth of any sort. Barring the pretty obvious unwaveringly good guy versus a bunch of bad (and worse, lazy) guys and a mining disaster construct, the film has little to offer.

Gill is reduced to a single-note character and his incredible story is rendered merely as an ear-splitting, broad strokes spectacle. The lead actor’s limited-bandwidth performance is of no help. As the makers of this film envision him, he is a larger-than-life figure who isn’t assailed by any doubts or moments of weakness.

Undeterred by the chaos around him and never dithering, he goes about the job of saving the workers gasping for breath in an inundated coal mining pit as if he were a man strolling in a park. The enormity of his achievement – he devises an untested rescue method – and the magnitude of his courage and commitment are undermined in the process.

Gill’s pregnant wife, Nirdosh Kaur (Parineeti Chopra, seen in four and a half sequences), is an epitome of fortitude and patience. When her husband advises her to exercise caution, she retorts that women back in her pind (village) work in the fields one day and go into labour the very next day without batting an eyelid. Contrast that with the locals, men and women alike – they are either despairing crybabies or habitual no-hopers who cannot do without a saviour from a land of warriors.

The trapped miners – among them are men played by Ravi Kishan, Sudhir Pandey, Jameel Khan and Omkar Das Manikpuri – bicker incessantly as their chances of getting out alive recede, oxygen levels fall  and the water that has gushed into the pit gets closer to the elevated part of the channel that they have sought refuge in.

The desperate men are frequently at each other’s throats and, as panic mounts, do everything in their power to jeopardise their own lives. Their distressed family members, mostly women and elderly men, rave and rant and howl and holler. One of them, having lost hope of seeing her son again, slaps Gill in the heat of the moment only to regret her action soon enough.

The officer takes it on the chin and continues to do what has got to be done to ensure that the miners are rescued even as a bunch of recalcitrant Bengalis try to make things difficult for him. This bunch of men is led by mining engineer D. Sen (Dibyendu Bhattacharya), a well-worn pop-culture stereotype of the slothful native of Bengal.

Sen, stationed in Ranchi, is the villain of the story. He claims that he knows the area like the back of his hand and should, therefore, be in charge of the rescue operation. He wants to see Jaswant Singh’s daring mission fail because he cannot stand the Mahabir Colliery chief R.J. Ujjwal (Kumud Mishra).

His disruptive interventions border on the farcical as does his general demeanour. He is shown eating, drinking hot milk, putting his feet up without a care in the world and getting a lackey to massage him while Gill and his team do not so much as take a single breather.

The Raniganj mine crisis occurred in November 1989 in the coal belt of West Bengal on the border of what was Bihar back then. The Left Front was in its third term as the ruling formation in Calcutta.

Although the film offers frequent flashes of red party flags being waved in the background, it isn’t interested in exploring the impact of trade unionism on the mines or questions of safety measures and working conditions.

That would have required a great deal of research as well as knowledge and understanding of contemporary state-level politics and the workings of Coal India. All this is beyond the makers’ ken. So they choose the easiest way out.

The film pits a fearless and fastidious North Indian knight in shining armour not just against a mining accident of daunting proportions but also against a bunch of not just unhelpful but also corrupt, cowardly and self-serving locals, which includes a smarmy politician, Gobardhan Roy (Rajesh Sharma).

The bashing of Bengalis assumes a literal form late in the film when one of them is subjected to lathi blows by a man who holds him and his ilk responsible for giving Bengal a bad name. In a crunch situation, Sen exhorts his two assistants, a Sengupta and a Roy, to show the world what a Royal Bengal Tiger is made of. The pair develops cold feet. The ‘tigers’ chicken out.

Mission Raniganj opens with a sequence in which a workers’ leader, a blustery Bengali of course, demands the reinstatement of a miner dismissed from service on the charge of being drunk on duty. In walks Gill and puts the man in his place. Suitably chastened by the Sardar’s iron-fist-in-velvet-gloves toughness, he beats a hasty retreat. We immediately know what the protagonist is up against.

All this would be dismissed as plain silly had the film’s superficial ways not undermined the innately dramatic tale so irretrievably. Mission Raniganj is the sort of film that manages to reduce an actor of Kumud Mishra’s range to a nonentity. He struggles to breathe life into a man who is grappling with blood pressure and sinking spirits and who is, therefore. compelled to let Gill hog the limelight.

In conclusion, all that one can say about a film that makes a hash of a wonderful tale of grit, gumption and glory is: what a disaster! Mission Raniganj is high-intensity drama undermined by low-calibre filmmaking.