Aaaaaaaaaa…he is back! Or so one thought half-way through the film. If not particularly original, Sarkar Raj was off to a flying start for Ram Gopal Varma’s fans who were waiting to exhale after the debacle that was … Aag.

But alas not quite. Post interval, the story unravelled like the stock market struck by the sub-prime boulder.

In the sequel to Varma’s 2005 hit Sarkar, the Nagre family literally moves into new territory. Village land is required to set up a power plant that will solve the power crisis in Maharashtra.

Sarkar aka Subhash Nagre (Amitabh Bachchan) has handed the reins to son Shankar (Abhishek), who takes it as his personal mission to set up the Shepherd Power Plant proposed by a London-based company and thus establish his political authority.

The tautly scripted (Prashant Pandey) first half begins to settle into a contemporary political film with the face-off between the red flags and the saffron flags; displacement of people vs development projects, the passing of the baton, even a strangely confused self-styled Gandhivadi who believes in violent revolution and once mentored Sarkar. Amit Roy’s cinematography is pure art.

As with many of Varma’s films, the subtext is much more interesting than the broader story. Sarkar Raj’s short-lived triumph lies in its portrayal of how moral or ethical concerns are no longer a burden borne by the elite or the educated.

Aishwarya Rai’s corporate honcho Anita Rajan, for instance, is hardly repelled by Shankar’s confession of his brother’s murder. If the script had lived upto its potential till the end, Varma would have had a winner of a cautionary tale.

What we meet in its place is a film with a split personality. Sarkar Raj begins by redeeming the faith that the Bachchans have in Varma. The tension is thick. The sparring edgy. The power play in motion. The dislocated second half undoes all the early good grades.

Varma cannot resist the temptation of flicking the car blow-up scene from the original Godfather. One can even forgive him for the hideous caricature that he reduces the deputy chief minister (Shayaji Shinde) to. Although the wordless bodyguard and the sleazy Kazi (Govind Namdeo) are brilliant.

The film is not helped by the annoying background score, especially the Govinda, govinda track that is loudly repeated so often it can be confused for a Balaji teleserial sound effect.

Both Bachchan men smoulder competently enough. Pa’s fans will be happy. After Babban (Varma’s Gabbar) who wouldn’t be? Abhishek’s face is riveting when he hears that his wife is expecting.

Aishwarya looks gorgeous and tries to bring some complexity to her role which however reduces her to playing naive second fiddle to all the men in her life: her father, her lover and finally Sarkar. Are CEOs so unused to skulduggery in backroom politics?

The film is not going to be helped by TV reporters who blithely give away the surprise elements in the film, few as they are, shortly after the first show.

But it is Varma who is absolutely unforgivable in the manner he abandons the plot. In the climax, the director of Company gives short shrift to the language of cinema and to the visual plot.

Instead, he sits the ageing doyen down and has him deliver an unending monologue that in effect replaces cinema with a read-aloud storytelling.

Not even Aishwarya’s calculated “chai lao” at the end can make up for it. A ‘cutting chai’ this.