Bastar: The Naxal Story, released on March 15, 2024, feels like a cynical cash grab—an opportunistic stab by director Sudipto Sen and producer Vipul Amrutlal Shah to ride the coattails of The Kashmir Files and their own The Kerala Story. After striking gold with the latter’s divisive, controversy-stoking formula, the makers clearly hoped to churn out another hit by swapping radical Islamists for Naxalites, banking on the same cocktail of outrage bait and graphic shock value. What they’ve delivered instead is a shrill, sloppy misfire that exposes their playbook as a one-trick pony running on fumes—a film so desperate to mimic its predecessors’ success that it forgets to be coherent, let alone compelling.

The plot centers on IPS officer Neerja Madhavan (Adah Sharma), a one-woman wrecking crew out to obliterate Naxalism in Chhattisgarh’s Bastar region. It’s a flimsy retread of the Kerala Story template: take a complex socio-political issue, slap on a righteous protagonist, and drown it in gore and jingoism to rile up a specific audience. But where The Kashmir Files tapped into raw historical wounds and The Kerala Story stirred a cultural hornet’s nest, Bastar flounders, unable to find the same emotional or ideological footing. The Naxal insurgency, with its tangled roots in tribal displacement and systemic neglect, is reduced to a cartoonish evil—axe-wielding Maoists hacking up innocents while leftist “urban Naxals” sip wine and cheer from Delhi. It’s a lazy caricature that reeks of a team trying to bottle lightning twice without understanding why it struck in the first place.

Adah Sharma, reprising her role as the makers’ go-to crusader, is a parody of herself. Her Neerja thunders through monologues and gunfights with a fervor that’s more overacted than intense, her freckled face and pregnant belly thrown in for cheap pathos. She’s meant to be a symbol of unwavering justice, but the script—penned by Sen, Amarnath Jha, and Shah—gives her nothing but slogans to shout and bodies to shoot. The supporting cast fares no better: Vijay Krishna’s Naxal leader Lanka Reddy is a snarling stereotype, while Raima Sen’s Vanya Roy, the elitist leftist puppetmaster, is so absurdly villainous she’d fit better in a comic book than a serious drama. Indira Tiwari’s grieving tribal widow Ratna is the lone flicker of humanity, but she’s sidelined by the film’s obsession with bombast.

The screenplay is the real culprit—a disjointed, manipulative mess that prioritizes propaganda over storytelling. It opens with a gruesome dismemberment to shock, then piles on conspiracy theories linking Naxals to Lashkar-e-Taiba and JNU liberals, all while defending the controversial Salwa Judum militia with zero nuance. It’s a blatant attempt to ape The Kashmir Files’ visceral outrage and The Kerala Story’s polarizing stats-dropping, but it lacks the former’s focus or the latter’s divisive hook. The result is a 124-minute shriek fest that’s less a movie and more a WhatsApp forward brought to life—graphic violence (76 jawans roasted alive, anyone?) paired with ear-splitting music to mask the absence of depth. Where its predecessors at least sparked debate, Bastar just numbs you with noise.

The production values are passable—jungle shootouts look decent, and the gore is detailed enough to unsettle—but it’s all in service of a film that’s DOA at the box office (a measly Rs 3 crore in its first week). The makers’ gambit to cash in on the nationalist wave that buoyed The Kashmir Files and The Kerala Story has backfired spectacularly, proving that lightning doesn’t strike thrice when your formula’s this stale. Bastar isn’t just a failure—it’s a neon sign of creative bankruptcy, a team coasting on past glory without a shred of fresh insight.

I’d give it 1.5 out of 5 stars—a grudging nod to its technical sheen and Tiwari’s fleeting grace, but little else. Bastar: The Naxal Story is a failed clone of better controversies, a film that swings for outrage and lands in irrelevance. The makers bet big on repeating their old tricks and lost, leaving us with a shrill reminder that not every hot-button issue can be milked into a hit.