An Action Hero flopped but its take on boycott culture hits home after Pathaan

Ayushman Khurrana has starred in so many “social message” films by now that he has his own genre in Bollywood now. 2022, a slow year for Bollywood, was no exception. Khurrana took on the Northeast insurgency in the summer flop Anek followed by him donning the robes of a gynecologist for another flop Doctor G. 

The Roadies alumnus finally ended the year with yet another flop in December, the satirical action flick An Action Hero that recently dropped on Netflix. Back when it was released on the big screen, Delhi-based podcaster Divyansh Sharma AKA Culture Ghalib was perhaps the only person that I knew who had watched it. Ghalib thoroughly enjoyed the film with his hot take being "An Action Hero not working in theatres is a clear indication of who the target group is". 

Watching it on Netflix a month later, I can agree with him.

If it was just marketed as a Netflix original, An Action Hero might have enjoyed the fate of last year’s critical favourites Monica O My Darling and Qala. If the average Bollywood watcher is paying for a PVR ticket with taxes and add-on charges (not to forget the expensive popcorn), they would want to see the hypermasculine action hero saving the world and romancing the heroine. Pathaan’s continuing success over the boycott gang bears testimony to this. 

In An Action Hero, debutant director Anirudh Iyer takes the ingredients of the great Indian masala flick and sets out to cook an entirely different recipe. Much like what Vasan Bala did with Mard Ko Dard Nahi Hota, Iyer’s subversive take on masculinity and the action genre is a watch suited for those audiences who crave for a dash of logic and realism in their films. With Khurrana playing the film’s titular action hero (complete with washboard abs and “filmy” dialogues), Neeraj Yadav’s screenplay injects him with heavy doses of self-aware humour.

While such “meta” elements could have made An Action Hero an exercise in pretentiousness, it actually works (just not on the big screen).

While the film satirically exaggerates the dynamism of Bollywood heroes, it perhaps gets too brutally honest with everything else. When Khurrana’s superstar Maanav is accused of murder, a media circus erupts with lookalikes of That Bespectacled Anchor butchering his image and coming up with all sorts of conspiracy theories. Maanav’s fans too seem to be turning against him, with calls to lynch him and to boycott all of his films.

From the aftermath of Sushant Singh Rajput’s death to the boycotts on Laal Singh Chadha, An Action Hero seems like the most relevant Bollywood production at the moment. Not only does it address the chameleon-like colour-changing that the audience can show in their love for a star but Iyer’s debut also touches upon the loss that an entire industry suffers. 

In the montages showing the over-the-top media debates, an exceptionally reasonable journalist is shown remarking on how a boycott demand goes on to affect the livelihood of not just the leading names of the production but the hundreds and thousands of daily-wage crew members. Given that An Action Hero was released just a few weeks after the protests around Besharam Rang had began sparking, it almost seemed to foreshadow the anti-Shah Rukh Khan hatred before the release of Pathaan.

However, thanks to the Streisand effect and King Khan’s own beloved star image, Pathaan still managed to rake in a whopping worldwide collection of Rs 500 crore (and still counting) in its first week of release. Endless media publications are even hailing Pathaan’s success within a larger “love over hate” narrative and understandably so.

With Bollywood struggling to deliver a quintessential masala flick after the pandemic, the audience finally got what they wanted: SRK returning to the big screen after four years, delivering unabashedly melodramatic dialogues, and of course, saving the country. An Action Hero, meanwhile, serves as a footnote in Bollywood’s history books.

Not to spoil An Action Hero for you but the storyline does get into the nitty-gritties of Bollywood’s brand of heroism to the point of self-reflection for its lead character and the watcher. From a commercial point of view, An Action Hero was meant to bomb as the vast majority wouldn’t want to spend their weekend in a theatre to self-reflect!

While the neo-noir blockbuster Andhadhun (again starring Khurrana) did good business at the box office, it is obviously a Herculean task for a debutant director to expect good monetary collections from a satire. It is worth noting that Andhadhun was Sriram Raghavan’s fifth film in a career filled with experimental ups and downs. 

Coming to a more recent example like Vasan Bala’s 2018 debut Mard Ko Dard Nahi Hota, the homage to Bollywood masala and kung fu cinema was lauded at the Toronto International Film Festival and back home but could make only Rs 2 crore at the domestic box office (as opposed to its Rs 12 crore budget). The OTT space has been more gracious to Bala with his sophomore effort Monica O My Darling being one of Netflix India’s most trending titles of 2022. 

Not just debutants, even experimental industry veterans can save up on losses with an OTT demographic. Just look at Anurag Kashyap’s AK vs AK, a meta-mockumentary that found him and actor Anil Kapoor playing fictionalised versions of themselves. Released on Netflix on the Christmas of 2021, the film gained polarising reviews. While its streaming numbers are uncertain, it seems very obvious that a satirical mockumentary like this would have absolutely bombed in a theatrical release. 

With An Action Hero having just dropped on the streaming platform last weekend, its admirers (like Ghalib and myself) can only hope that it finds new life among a new audience base. 

A scene involving Anil Kapoor stands out in AK vs AK. Desperate to find his daughter Sonam (who is abducted by Kashyap), the Bollywood actor barges in a public celebration in Mumbai and gets on the stage, begging the audience for some help. But for the people in front of him, Kapoor has always been a star more than human. So, they ask him to perform first instead. Driven to his wits' end, Kapoor even complies and dances out some of his Ram Lakhan steps!

This ideal of stardom is fleshed out further with An Action Hero as its viewers can see. Jaideep Alhawat’s villainous character Bhoora Solanki perhaps sums it up best,