It really bothers me to read such media critiques that dont seem to understand how cinema is an affective medium. Like the vigilante cop is never meant to be a lawful figure. He's a wishful moral projection to highlight the failure of the state apparatus. https://www.livemint.com/mint-lounge/features/rethinking-the-angry-young-cop-in-indian-cinema/amp-11594575984428.html?__twitter_impression=true

We can certainly argue how vigilantism's tools for justice are its own criminality (& I make no defence for police brutality in cinema or real life), but mass cinema hinges on populist sentiments about justice; its mass-ness is the point. It'd be wiser to ask why this is mass.

What is interesting in Hindi cinema at least, the vigilante has often been an outsider, a savarna "commoner" but also sometimes a Sholay-esque savarna "Thakur." The Brahmin-savarna vigilante cop says something specific about this historical moment's imagination of state & nation.

It would be worth exploring why film publics have turned to watching a cop act extra-judicially as a libidinal pleasure. Where once Bachchan as Vijay Khanna had to be suspended from the police to take revenge on the criminal Teja (Zanjeer, 1973), Bhai's Chulbul Pandey turns up...

... with a full police force to fight the bad dude who killed his mother (Dabangg, 2010 - interestingly though, Pandey is not in uniform throughout that full climax fight scene). But anyway, there's been a shift in the Hindi audience's imagination of the long arm of the law...

... that once had a more ambiguous relationship to notions of "justice" (sometimes the criminal went to jail, sometimes he just had to be killed), but that now seems to be divorced from justice entirely, which has to be sought through murderous retribution & nothing less.

It's easy to blame films entirely for this, but media criticism cannot exclude the social and historical developments that create such desires for screen narratives. And audience demand drives mass cinema, all of this has to be accounted for instead of just "lazy writing."

Finally, as a nudge-nudge, let me refer to Vijay Mishra who noted Zanjeer's libidinal lust for violence echoes mythological constructs of dharmic retribution. YRF's Mardaani transposes those dharmic sentiments onto a savarna female cop with similar mythological overtones...

... (Rani Mukherjee famously said there is an essence of Durga in her cop character). What cultural ethos defines our understanding of justice? What narratives of divine and human dharma have directed popular cinematic/televisual narratives for so many decades now? Hmm...?