August 16 1947 is a Tamil film which has been dubbed in Hindi and produced by A R Murugadoss of Ghajini fame. It tells the story of a remote village where a menacing British officer exploits the residents and forces them to work long hours while cultivating cotton. The basic plot is interesting. Many films have been made on independence but here, an interesting angle is that the villagers are not aware that India has become independent and continue to serve their British master. Sadly, the humour is bad. Not a single funny scene induce laughter. The scenes of Britishers torturing Indians are too extreme and after a point, it becomes difficult to sit through it. The intermission point is clapworthy and one expects the second half to be way better. Nothing of that sort happens and the writing, in fact, gets poorer after the interval. After watching August 16 1947, my love and admiration for RRR grew. Even that film was about merciless Britishers harassing poor Indian villagers. But S S Rajamouli knew how much to show and where to draw the line, and of course also to pepper the narrative with genuinely funny moments. Here, the makers missed the boat. Speaking of performances, Gautham Karthik is okay. Revathy Sharma makes a confident debut. Richard Ashton and Jason Shah are fine as the villains. The actors playing the villagers are passable. All in all, August 16 1947 is a missed opportunity.
My rating – ** out of 5!