'When Ranbir comes back with a machine gun...': Veteran filmmaker reviews 'Animal'

Receiving rave reviews for his performance from audiences and critics alike, Bollywood A-lister Ranbir Kapoor has managed to bowl over a veteran Indian filmmaker as well with his act in ‘Animal’.

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After being postponed from the August release, Ranbir Kapoor and Rashmika Mandanna’s maiden collaboration, ‘Animal’ finally hit the theatres this Friday, scoring a bumper opening at the Box Office. The title grossed INR356 crores in its worldwide ticket sales at the end of the debut weekend.

National Film Award-winning director Ram Gopal Varma, known for his polarising cinema, was among the initial cine-goers of ‘Animal’, who turned to theatres over the past weekend to witness the craze of Kapoor’s much-anticipated collaboration with South filmmaker Sandeep Reddy Vanga.

After watching the film, Varma penned a detailed review of the pan-Indian action entertainer, which made the viewers argue violently about what the film stands for. “There will be massive fights over the content and the character of Ranbir in Animal long after its box office run is over and I truly believe it can also trigger a cultural overhaul due to the way Sandeep has ripped off the clothes of moral hypocrisy with his bare naked honesty. That is because Animal is not merely a film..it is a social statement,” he wrote.

Speaking of his most favourite part of the movie, he wrote, “One of my favourite moments is when against everyone’s expectations, including me in the audience was that he will come back with a baseball bat or something, but when he comes back with a machine gun that almost made us all fall off our chairs.” Varma called the scene ‘a pure cinematic gem’.

He went on to shower praises on Kapoor for his magnificent theatrics and penned, “Not from the 1st film of India, Raja Harishchandra in 1913 till now in 2023 in the last 110 years was there more consistency and intensity in an actor’s portrayal of a character than what Ranbir did in Animal.”

“More than him being physically naked in a particular scene, he was emotionally naked throughout the film in his performance which takes much more strength of mind than just being physically naked,” Varma added.

Apart from the lead duo, the neo-noir action-thriller, co-written and directed by South Indian filmmaker Sandeep Reddy Vanga, also features Anil Kapoor, Bobby Deol and Tripti Dimri in pivotal roles.

Despite a massive opening day collection, ‘Animal’ drew mixed reactions from critics, with many calling it misogynistic, like previous outings of Vanga, including ‘Arjun Reddy’ and ‘Kabir Singh’.

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