WTF Liger: Vijay Deverakonda's bhangra, Ananya Panday being herself, Mike Tyson's joke

The sports drama formula is simple: show an underdog hero, train him under a strict coach, training montage, a lover for emotional support, victory at a major sports tournament and the end. Instead, Liger decides to ‘reinvent’ the formula with a whole lot of Ananya Panday’s cringe-inducing lines, Vijay Deverakonda doing whatever he wants to, and Mike Tyson showing up in an unexplainable cameo. 

The title, Liger, refers to a crossbreed of a lion and a tiger. Guess sometimes, crossbreeding experiments don’t work well as is evident from Puri Jagannadh’s ‘pan-Indian’ film (although it is doubtful whether it has any ‘pan-Indian’ approach to it). Jagannadh has carved his niche in making the most regressive films that play around the outdated masala recipe of the hero saving the damsel in distress and then saving the day. Liger is of the same breed. 

Within a day of its release, Liger is already getting showered with negative reviews, particularly towards the writing and Ananya Panday’s acting. The hyped Mike Tyson cameo again got no redeeming points. Here’s a look at some highlights. (Spoiler Alert: proceed only if you have seen Liger or if you have no wish to see Liger). 

Ananya Panday’s introduction: Ananya Panday, the actress who has never made a mark with her acting, tries her best to play the part of a social media influencer. The superficiality and tonedeafness of an average Insta influencer should have been a good role for Panday (just like how Sonam Kapoor isn’t that bad when it comes to ‘bougee’ roles in Aisha, Khoobsurat, Veere Di Wedding etc). But Panday is as lifeless as expected and Jagannadh’s vision of what an influencer acts like is amusing to say the least. 

Contrasting with Vijay Deverakonda’s Liger running a small tea stall with his mother (Ramya Krishna) is Panday’s Taniya who is introduced in choppily-edited scenes showing her partying with her friends in yachts and sipping champagne. Surrounded by her minions, Panday then asks them to come up with “captions, bios” so that she can get “millions of likes”. 

When Taniya and Liger cross paths for the first time, she shouts at Liger alleging him to have fat-shamed her in a comment. Before Liger can even say anything, Taniya starts flaunting her body saying she has the perfect “ratio” (whatever that’s supposed to mean). 

Other iconic Taniya moments include her telling her friends, “Let’s go to the club and party hard”. After a fight with Liger, she tells him that within a few years, she is on her way to become a “Hollywood superstar”. A face, meet palm would be the most apt reaction.

Emasculating fighters in a dojo: It is shown from the start that Liger has some exceptional street-fighting skills which he wishes to hone so that he can become a world-class MMA fighter. His pursuit for this goal brings him to a so-called “dojo” where the other fighters mock him for his stutter (a disability that Deverakonda emulates with the most hammy acting possible). 

But he lets his fist and high-school-level humour do the talking as he not only overpowers his enemies, he also indicates with some weird hand signs on what he would do if they mess with them. The gestures can be translated as Liger wanting to cut off their penises and rolling their testicles in a dice-like fashion. If this weren’t enough, Deverakonda delivers one of the most memorable lines in cinematic history, 

Liger vs white women: A lot of things happen in Liger without any context. A prime example is a fight that Liger has with a group of white women in America. He is bashed up relentlessly before he strikes back not just with his fight moves but some dialogues that you would wonder how Puri Jagannadh even came up with.

In one moment, Liger asks a woman why she is pissed at him: did he impregnate her and abandoned her? Then, he comments on their bad fighting skills and asks them if they kiss as badly. Moral policing also comes in the way as Liger adds that good girls shouldn’t fight or they won’t get married. Major Arjun Reddy flashbacks. The fact that all these dialogues are delivered unironically is heavily concerning. 

The Mike Tyson climax: One would think that the film’s climax would be in the MMA octagon, ending with an adrenaline-fuelled duel. Being the auteur he is, Puri Jagannadh decides to upturn these sports drama conventions with the most absurd of celebrity cameos in Indian cinema. Snoop Dogg singing Singh Is Kingg and Sylvester Stallone saving Kareena Kapoor in Kambakht Ishqq is nothing in comparison to Tyson’s scenes in Liger. 

In a climax that deserves to be taught at film schools in the future, Tyson heads a gang to whom Chunky Panday’s businessman character owes money (oh yes, Ananya Panday’s father also cameos in case you didn’t know). As he cannot pay the gang members the required money, they decide to turn into old Hindi film goons and kidnap the heroine. 

What follows is a duel between Liger and Mike Tyson who for some reason, is dressed up as a cowboy in the middle of a desert. Tyson is clearly here for the immense fees that he might have charged and it shows. The reason why he laughs in most of his scenes is not just the fact that he cannot act but also perhaps because he is laughing at the sheer ridiculousness of the project. 

The brutal boxer who has been involved in controversies like literally biting the ear of his opponent is reduced to a joke as Liger not only punches and kicks him but even whips his legs with a stick. He makes Tyson run like a kid with the boxer showing him the finger in retaliation. And once Tyson is beat up good, that is how the film ends!

In a recent podcast appearance, Mike Tyson was asked to comment on his cameo on Liger. It might have taken him a good amount of drug-induced sedation to forget the traumatic experience as Tyson actually seemed to be clueless about the film! It took him a few seconds to recall that he had indeed played the antagonist in a pan-Indian disaster. 

Vijay Deverakonda does bhangra: Tanishk Bagchi loves remixing songs (or massacring songs as his haters would say) and this time around, he helms a version of the Punjabi song Coka. And if hearing the song wasn’t painful enough, the accompanying visual to Coka 2.0 features Deverakonda doing bhangra. 

Everything from the expressions to the dance moves seem forced and if you can watch the entire music video without cringing, then you’ve bravely survived a traumatising fever dream. Yes, Liger was intent at cashing in on the pan-Indian hype but making a Telugu star do some cringe-inducing Punjabi steps isn’t how you make your film pan-Indian!

In the end, this mess of a film feels like it is straight out of the brain of an imaginative eighth-grader. Watching the Hindi dub of a WWE episode might prove to be a more interesting experience.