It may be coming from a good place, but it doesn’t know where it’s going.

…the end is chaos, very far from the non-violent satyagrah that the film propounds: gun-toting hooligans and cops run around the town, ending predictably in noble deaths and lectures on morality and goodness.

Without a doubt, Prakash Jha — a perennial political complaint box — offers nothing new either by way of content or style. How you’d like insights and information, from him, which you don’t know already. That would amount to excellent cinema, and not just one more star-fuelled trip into a political void. Suggestion: avoid.

If good intentions were enough to make good movies, Satyagraha would be a masterpiece. Prakash Jha is one of the few directors in Bollywood who has consistently championed political cinema. His rage at the rotten state of the system has simmered through his movies for nearly three decades. But from the National Award-winning Damul in 1984 to Satyagraha, his stories have become increasingly simplistic, star-driven and heavy-handed.

Producer-director Prakash Jha has his heart in the right place as he once again chooses a topic — in this film’s case corruption — that is singeing the country more than anything else today but delivers a potion that is but a terrible hodgepodge of Arakshan, Rajneeti and Gangaajal.

Parts of Satyagraha make perfect sense but, on the whole, it never comes close to clicking into top gear. It leaves you more disappointed than angry.

… a weightless film that leaves by a transitory impact on its audiences. Wasting the enigma of such talented bunch of actors, the film with its overbearing story and its erratically structured plot lacks the much needed blaze. Emerging as a warped product of political correctness with an unconvincing climax, somehow the entire product had the stench of unbearable staleness. It wasn’t a terrible film, just not the promising Prakash Jha venture you might have wanted to watch.

Getting out of the hole that you dig can become very difficult when you mix real life events and fiction and the film flounders in the climax. While there are a few poignant points and moments on the face of it but if you dig deeper there are plenty of flaws in the screenplay.

More whimpering than a roar, this movie unfortunately induced yawns instead of any feeling of rebellion.

Satyagraha is neither compelling, nor gripping. Unlike Jha’s other hard-hitting political dramas, this one is too light and monotonous. The movie goes on and on with a poor script, at times testing your patience. Nothing can spare you in Satyagraha, until it concludes and you get a breather finally!

Though Prakash Jha has his heart in the right place when it comes to politically-themed films, it’s not enough to reward this Satyagraha with anything but 2 stars.

Satyagraha solely documents and offers fleeting wisdom. It succeeds at highlighting the problem but fails at achieving poignancy.