When Satya released in 1998, Bollywood was soaking in syrupy romances like Dil To Pagal Hai and Mumbai underworld as a subject was quite Hebrew. The film had unknown faces in the lead and the director, Ram Gopal Varma, had just delivered a big turkey in Daud.

Very few turned up in the first couple of weeks but once that bug called word-of-mouth took over, Satya not only became a box-office hit but emerged as the new benchmark in realistic cinema in India, going on to spawn filmmakers like Anurag Kashyap and Vishal Bhardwaj. It all started with Satya.

Now with Satya 2 arriving a good 15 years later, Mumbai underworld today spells ‘tedious’ on screen with so many movies having already shredded the subject to bits. Varma himself has made a dozen under different one-word titles. In the turkey-delivering department RGV’s business is, of coursing, booming.

And so this time too, very few will turn up in the first couple of weeks, but Satya 2 is unlikely to do any damage at the box office and definitely not become a benchmark of any sort. The unknown faces in the lead will remain unknown and it will not inspire any young dreamer. But will it all end with Satya 2?

If Krrish was a soch last week, underworld is a soch this week as the characters keep reminding you. But Satya 2 is actually a sequel in soch! Because none of those characters come back. Most were dead anyway but with Varma, turning people into ghosts is child’s play. Thankfully he doesn’t do that and only calls his protagonist Satya.

Also he keeps the format of the story the same. An outsider comes to Mumbai and tries to lead a regular life before getting blood on his hands. There Satya got into the underworld; here Satya sets up a new underworld. Because as the ad says, “Dawood Ibrahim has retired”, “Chota Rajan has become inactive” and “Abu Salem is in jail”.

Satya has a love interest in Chitra and a friend in Nara. In scenes echoing the earlier film, the three of them along with Nara’s girlfriend Special have lunches and dinners to show a contrast to the blood-spilled life Satya otherwise leads. The new underworld is called Company (yes ‘Company 2’ too will surely come to torture at a theatre near you) and in a Robin Hood Pandey twist to the tale, only kills the rich and the corrupt!

RGV’s new obsession for Satya 2 is the eagle view camera and so regardless of reason or season, there is unending footage of the Mumbai skyline even as he himself narrates all that soch-blabber. That doesn’t mean he has stopped taking that ant’s eye view under-the-table shots. At last count 67 cups of coffee and tea have been ordered, sipped and had in the film!

Also, you can’t miss three priceless moments in the movie. One is a rifle nozzle jutting out of Katrina Kaif’s left eye from a giant billboard. One is a lady in a burqa drilling a man’s genitals. One is a random man on the street looking at the camera and eating a banana. How and why these moments come up in the movie? Can’t spoil it for you, now!

Once RGV used to have an eye for talent. Satya itself not only brought to the fore future forces like Manoj Bajpai (Bhiku Mhatre), Vishal Bhardwaj (music), Anurag Kashyap (screenplay), but had such an amazing set of actors playing bit roles — Saurabh Shukla, Neeraj Vora, Govind Namdeo, Sushant Singh, Aditya Srivastava, Sanjay Mishra, Manoj Pahwa, et al.

Here, let’s not even get into the character artistes; the leads are so bland that it’s criminal. The guy playing Satya, Puneet Singh Ratn, doesn’t have the innocence or raw energy of Chakravarthy. He is asked to stare through his glasses and talk in a low-pitched voice but that doesn’t exude any intensity whatsoever. The rest are worse, straight out of rejected audition tapes. A slightly better cast could have made the pain a little more bearable.

There was a point when one actually looked forward to his new film. There was a point when one actually thought he would make a comeback. Now we have reached a point when one actually expects him to get it wrong again and again. That, sadly, has become Ram Gopal Varma ki satya.