Sardar Udham movie review: Vicky Kaushal is flawless in Shoojit Sircar’s slowburn period piece

A trip down the memory lane of this kind is always hard, especially if you’re reminded of what all you’ve lost in the process with only a hope for a bright and just future. Taking a leaf off India’s colonial past, director Shoojit Sircar’s Sardar Udham’ is a well researched slow burn featuring the revolutionary who shot dead Michael O’Dwyer, former Lt governor of the Punjab province who pulled the Jallianwala Bagh operation in 1919 in Amritsar, India.

The film moves backward in time with Vicky Kaushal’s Sardar Udham Singh shooting Michael O’Dwyer point blank as he addresses an East India Company convention. The film then establishes how Sardar reached London, entered then left and reentered several times before plotting his assassination with the help of different factions who were working against the British Crown and government for their own reasons like the IRA (Irish Republican Army) for one.

The film starts at a sluggish speed which leaves you wondering if it ever picks up pace and frankly it does not. But it saves the best for the last. The second half details the motive, the anger, the passion and the burning outcry of an Indian who has witnessed the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh having taken scores of his brethren to a nearby makeshift hospital on the fateful night.