DIESEL (2025)

I saw the poster of this movie, Diesel, a Bollywood movie released last year(2025), and it was tagged as an action movie. Indian movies that are tagged as action movies usually give a good watch, and seeing that this movie is centered on petroleum, my interest was piqued because I knew there was going to be intimidating wars and the burning of cities and villages over petroleum. But can you believe that I used up to a week to finish this 2-hour movie? It is dull, and each time I picked up my phone to watch it, I would doze off. After watching up to 1 hour and 40 minutes of the movie, I concluded that "action movie" should not have been among the movie classifications because, honestly, there is nothing action-packed in this movie.

No lies, the movie portrays how petroleum operations, especially corruption, work in a country and how some personnel hijack the system to their own advantage. This is what the movie is set on, and it should never be seen as an action movie because that was actually what lured me into watching it.

Manohar, the father of Diesel Vasudevan, is known to be a baron in the petroleum industry. He loots diesel, kerosene, and fuel, and gives back to the community afterward. Pathan, on the other hand, is his friend who has a huge political influence and has bought over the government and the police. He plans to steal all the petroleum supplies in the country so that his plan of wiping out a particular community, so he could build his port and establish a battery company, will come to pass. When trouble arose, Diesel beat up a corrupt police officer and went into hiding at sea while he was being hunted by the police. The beating scene is just a short one and not very entertaining, and it happens to be the only action scene in 1 hour and 30 minutes of the movie.

So, the main task is to stop Pathan from seizing the land for his personal use and also to recover the fuel he hijacked and locked away somewhere, which made the country suffer immensely.

Some of the scenes were very predictable, and some gave me déjà vu, especially when the community came out to speak on a live broadcast and used the #ISupportDiesel tag on social media to air their support for the ongoing movement.

Like I said, the movie is centered on the petroleum system and nothing more. The scriptwriter failed to spice it up with good action scenes, which are usually a hallmark of Indian village movies.

I would rate it a 3/10.

Thanks for reading.

Photo