A story with the potential to awe and pique, and an actor whose guileless enthusiasm strikes a bond with the audience no matter who he is playing, both come together in Mangal Pandey: The Rising, and manage to fuse into a few moments of pure brilliance.
While watching the movie, you get to see how history distills into a fable - how the complicated, meandering travails of a life, many lives, become a geometrically simple apologue. History book rewritings, carbon dating recalibrations and fresh perspectives have, in the past, always questioned the popular version of legends. <....