Suryaa Puts Sunny Deol Back in a Police Uniform on November 20, and It Might Be a Joseph Remake

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Sunny Deol's follow-up to Border 2 is a crime thriller called Suryaa, with the full title Suryaa: Ant Se Aarambh Tak, and it opens on November 20. The first look came out on October 12 and the motion poster followed, and the rugged, grey-bearded Deol in it is a long way from the flag-waving of his recent hits. He plays a retired police officer with a haunted past who gets pulled back into a murder investigation.

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M. Padmakumar directs, which is the detail that made me sit up. He is a Malayalam filmmaker, and The Week reports that Suryaa is widely understood to be a Hindi remake of Joseph, the 2018 Malayalam thriller with Joju George as a retired cop investigating a death that turns out to be part of something much larger. Padmakumar directed Joseph. The makers have not confirmed it, but the plot description is identical.

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If it is Joseph, that is good news. Joseph was a quiet, sad, procedural film about an ageing man who is better at his job than at his life, and it had a twist that genuinely landed. Deol doing quiet and sad is not what his audience expects, and that is exactly why I am interested. He was very good in Damini and Ghatak when he had a director who asked for restraint.

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Ravi Kishan, Pragya Jaiswal and Jisshu Sengupta are in support, with Manish Wadhwa and Tinnu Anand on some of the listings. MM Moviez produces. It opens the same day as Sunrise on the Reaping in the US and a week after Ramayana's second weekend in India, which is a tough slot for a mid-budget thriller.

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I will be there for a 69-year-old Sunny Deol playing his age in a film that does not need him to pull a hand pump out of the ground. Does a quieter Deol appeal, or do you want Gadar every time?