In a scene from London Files, Detective Om Singh, played by Arjun Rampal, walks through the corridor of the local police department. Colleagues and deputies wish him good morning, but he hides his eyes, reluctant but also disinterested. It is almost like Rampal is walking through his filmography, a glaring array of interventions that though promising at various turns, has disappointed in its entirety.
In London Files, Rampal plays a typically tortured cop, who vapes and broods in equal measure. An otherwise serviceable mystery, it is one of those Rampal performances that makes you wonder whatever happened to all that promise of a decade-and-a-half ago, when Rampal, supported by his chiselled face and deep baritone, felt like the next step in the evolution of the mainstream hero. It has been anything but.
Not too long ago, Rampal was centre-stage in ZEE5’s intriguing but ultimately underwhelming series The Final Call. Cast as a pilot, the actor mooned and exhibited about as emotion as a cockpit allows movement. It is not like Rampal has seen exceptional highs or started out with a bang.
A series of poor first-impressions in trying to latch onto the heartthrob type in Bollywood, Rampal’s early films are barely memorable. It us not a good sign when your Wikipedia page says “He received acclaim for improving his emotional acting” as a way to salvage the early part of your career. But there was clearly a mysticism about Rampal, a tonal departure from the sweet-sounding heroes of the day. Rampal instead looked stiffer, his lack of acting nous serving as an antidote to the blaring '90s Bollywood heroes had inflicted on its audience.
Rampal’s highest point in this slowest of slow starts to an unlikely career was the remake of Don (2006). The actor’s rugged, masculine exterior served as the perfect backdrop for a role that required to both deceive and lure. In Om Shanti Om (2007), Rampal played an authoritarian whose impressive exterior covered for a circus of brutal prejudices on the inside.
But the actor’s clinching, maybe his most out-of-body role was as the ageing, brooding guitarist of a defunct rock band in Rock On!! (2008). Think of it and Rampal has always been the guileless rockstar in a sea of affable beta men that ruled Bollywood by being a very obvious kind of romantics. Understandably, Rampal flourished where he was either the villain or simply, against the ropes of life, desexualised by its implications. Everywhere else, where Rampal is both the subject and object, he has flunked the first sight of a test.
At its height, Rock On!! should have been the definitive moment in the actor’s career. But now that you look back, none of the actors from the film bar Farhan Akhtar truly found solid ground later (coincidently, Purab Kohli is a co-star in London Files).
Perhaps one of the reasons could be that in an industry that reinvents or is forced to reconsider its tropes every other decade, Rampal has unfortunately stuck with the good-looking brooder type that lands him his next promising film/series that usually turns out to be anything but.
Rampal obviously cannot pull off the kind of range actors of today like Varun Dhawan and Ayushmann Khurrana have shown. He clearly cannot shoulder entire stories by himself because it requires the kind of screen presence and chameleon-like qualities that Rampal has never really exhibited.
Maybe Rampal has simply been hard-done by the direction our cinema has taken in general. Small-town tales crowded by character actors who seamlessly pick up accents and eccentricities of the hinterland are in vogue, whereas elite, metrosexual men who speak perfect English and run handsomely down the street, their wavy locks sensualising even the dullest moments of grief, are simply not in demand.
It is kind of absurd that Rampal has somewhat outlasted contemporaries like Fardeen Khan and Tusshar Kapoor, and is competing with the once-excellent Vivek Oberoi. Not that the bar in these cases was high, but it kind of tells you that not an exceptional lot had to be done to ensure longevity. At least others like Hrithik Roshan, John Abraham, and the perpetually struggling Abhishek Bachchan have tried to reinvent themselves. Rampal, on the other hand, seems to have done the bare minimum in terms of rewriting himself beyond the metrics of his desirability.
London Files, though intriguing as a concept, is for some reason, set in a foreign country. As if to accommodate the sophisticated vocabulary of actors like Kohli and Rampal, rather than to set it in a place where the environment plays a role more significant than being the backdrop for a couple of handsome, incredibly lean fathers in distress.
At several points in his two-decade long career, the argument has probably been made that under the steely, almost improbably handsome Arjun Rampal, there is an actor waiting to be drawn out by the right script and story. Every project he announces next sounds like the eventual exhibition of the talent that Arjun Rampal has always seemed to carry beneath a breathtakingly likeable external configuration. Only to be anything but.
It is not like Rampal disappeared for years, and then rejuvenated. He has been around, consistently performing but barely registering anything that confirms the appraisal of his talent that perhaps peaked too soon. There are no rewards for longevity in this industry, and you have to wonder if anyone will get anything out of a promising career, that simply has not hit the peaks it once promised to.
London Files is streaming on Voot Select.
Manik Sharma writes on art and culture, cinema, books, and everything in between.
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