New Delhi, April 18 -- Little details tend to annoy when the broader experience is choppy. In the first half hour of Kesari Chapter 2, every musical choice had me scribbling notes. The generic sad song that plays over the end of the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh. The nu-metal that accompanies one of Akshay Kumar's dramatic entries. The angelic chorus that practically announces the fate of an earnest young revolutionary.

Jallianwala Bagh has been solemnly depicted in several Hindi films, most starkly in Sardar Udham (2021). More than 1500 people were killed in the 1919 massacre after General Dyer commanded army troops to fire on a crowd of civilians trapped in a garden. Though the British tried to suppress the details, enough pressure was ...