 |
 |
|
 |
||
 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
||
|
|
|
 |
Thursday, November 20, 2008Shiva Ka Insaaf Release Year: 1985Country: India Starring: Jackie Shroff, Shakti Kapoor, Poonam Dhillon, Vinod Mehra, Mazhar Khan, Parikshat Sahni, Gulshan Grover, Birbal, Satish Kaul, Nandita Thakur Writers: Ravi Kapoor, Mohan Kaul, Kader Khan Director: Raj N. Sippy Cinematographer: Ashok Mehta Music: R.D Burman Producer: Romu N. Sippy Until the mid eighties, the costumed superhero as we know him in the West was a figure largely absent from Indian cinema. The primary exceptions were those intermittent attempts to appropriate the Superman character that seem to dot the history of modern South Asian film, such as the competing attempts by directors Mohammed Hussain and Manmohan Sabir, Superman and Return of Mr. Superman, which were both released in 1960 and , curiously, starred the same actor, Jairaj, in the title role. Yet in the neon decade the industry seemed to see something of a mini renaissance in the appearance of such characters. Superstar Amitabh Bachchan's attempts to revive his career after his less-than-stellar turn in Indian politics, perhaps by way of overcompensation, included not one, but two portrayals of uber-abled caped crusaders, first in the relatively well received Shahenshah and then in the dreadful Toofan. In addition, 1987 saw yet another pass at the Man of Steel in the form of the infamous Superman, aka Indian Superman. And, most famously, there was that same year's mega-hit, Mr. India, in which Anil Kapoor portrayed a humble citizen who, granted the ability to become invisible at will, used his powers to defeat the enemies of his country. But before all of these there came another film based around the exploits of a costumed hero of superhuman abilities, 1985's Shiva Ka Insaaf.     The absence of traditional superheroes in Bollywood up to this point might well be explained by the fact that, despite that absence, the nation's screens saw no shortage of colorful figures fighting for the cause of justice and virtue with the aid of superhuman powers. These figures appeared in those films known as "Mythologicals", a staple of Indian cinema since its very inception, based on the religious epics the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Indeed, even Hollywood might have seen religious-based films become more of a staple genre had the tracts of Western religion been populated by such fanciful deities as the monkey god Hanuman, a fearless and cheekily charismatic hero who in modern times has even proven himself worthy of fighting alongside Ultraman. In fact, when, in the 1960s, India began to produce its own indigenous comic books, it was the heroes of the Ramayana and Mahabharata that featured in their pages. This is not to say that comics had not been produced in the country prior to that, but up to that time they had only been comprised of reprints of popular Western comics, such as Mandrake the Magician, Lee Falk's The Phantom, and, of course, Superman. It was only in the 1970s that bona fide and uniquely Indian superheroes began to see print, and it is perhaps due to those characters gradually making their way into the larger public consciousness that we saw films such as those mentioned above being released in the following decade. Still, the connection between India's superheroes and its cherished religious figures remained strong, as many of these films clearly evidence. In Toofan for instance, Amitabh's character is granted his powers by Hanuman, and in Shiva Ka Insaaf, our hero, Shiva, derives his powers from... well, the name pretty much says it all. (This practice can be seen even in more recent Bollywood superhero films, such as 2006's Krrish, in which the hero derives his name from that of Krishna.)     It was not the presence of a masked superhero alone upon which the movie Shiva Ka Insaaf depended for its novelty, however. The film is, in fact, sometimes mistakenly identified as being India's first film made in 3D, though that honor actually goes to 1984's My Dear Kuttichaathan, an enormously popular children's fantasy shot in the Malayalam language. Still, Shiva Ka Insaaf followed hot on the heels on My Dear Kuttichaathan, and can -- and did -- rightfully make the claim to being the first Hindi film shot in 3D. In India, the 3D process ran pretty much the same course that it does periodically throughout the rest of the world, making a big initial splash. which, in turn, inspired a short run of increasingly less successful films trumpeting its use (which included, in addition to Shiva Ka Insaaf, Indian cheapy horror maestros the Ramsay Brothers' 3D Saamri, aka Purana Mandir 2) before the industry abandoned it due to its financial returns not justifying the added expense of labor and capital that it required. In keeping with that familiar trend, Shiva Ka Insaaf contains within it all of those gimmicks that you'd expect from a movie riding a brief wave of 3D-mania, loaded with "gotcha" moments in which all manner of things are thrust at the camera in the hope of inspiring startled gasps on the part of the audience. Shiva Ka Insaaf features as its titular hero the actor Jackie Shroff, at the time a freshly-minted superstar thanks to his lead role in the blockbuster hit Hero the previous year. I have to admit that, prior to seeing Shiva Ka Insaaf, I had only seen Shroff in films of more recent vintage, and, while he has obviously aged into a beefy and appropriately craggy-faced picture of Bollywood machismo in the interim, it was shocking to see him here so fresh-faced and comparatively scrawny. Even his mustache looked undernourished to me. And, when suited up as Shiva, his heroic demeanor is undermined by a comportment that I can only describe as being a bit on the slouchy side. Of course, as many movie stars throughout the world have had the sad opportunity to learn, superhero movies, with their frequently ridiculous-looking costumes and over-hyped expectations, are an invitation for unflattering comparisons. We can't all be John Phillip Law in Diabolik, after all. In fact, none of us can, save John Phillip Law -- and God help the poor, pear-shaped everyman who tries to pour himself into a painted-on leather catsuit to prove otherwise. So simply add Shroff to the long line of thespians whose run-in with a form-fitting, head-to-toe leather superhero uniform left them looking more deflated than ennobled.     Anyone who has watched a lot of Bollywood action films knows that in them the parents of young boys are something of an endangered species, and that, if a pair of them are introduced during the first five minutes, odds are pretty high that they will soon be gunned down by a cackling villain while little Junior watches from some hiding place he's squirreled himself away in. Now, I've seen enough Spaghetti Westerns to know that this particular trope is not the exclusive property of Indian cinema, but it is only in Bollywood that it sees such steady repetition as to seem like the observance of some kind of ritual. In any case, Shiva Ka Insaaf makes admirably short work of this set-up, seeing that little Bhola's lawyer father and doting mother are dispatched by the ruthless bandit Jagan (Shakti Kapoor) within mere minutes of the opening credits. Of course, from his hiding place, Bhola can only see the telltale scar on Jagan's hand as these vicious acts play out, and thus are the seeds of vengeance and its lifelong pursuit sown. With his dying breath, Bhola's father tells the boy to seek out one of three men -- the names and photographs of whom are provided in a diary he keeps -- to take him in and give him a proper upbringing. Fortunately for Bhola, it turns out that all three men -- whose relation to Bhola's dad is never made clear -- live under one roof, Full House style. These men are Ram, Robert and Rahim (Vinod Mehra, Parikshat Sahni and Mazhar Khan), whose names echo the idealized vision of harmony between Hindu, Catholic and Muslim seen in numerous masala films -- especially those directed by Manmohan Desai, such as, most famously, Amar Akbar Anthony. Perhaps what unites Uncles Ram, Robert and Rahim, despite their different faiths, is the fact that they are all hirsute macho men and that each, in his own way, is a raging badass. To illustrate this, we are shown a series of vignettes, the first of which shows Ram wielding his fists and a pair of bamboo sticks that he uses like nunchucks with fearsome effectiveness, sending a bad guy flying through a wall and leaving a perfect man-shaped hole in his wake. Next we see Robert practicing a unique skill in which he launches little metal balls -- directly at the camera, naturally -- from little cups located on the tips of his shoes, hitting his targets with startling accuracy. Finally Rahim demonstrates that he is very good with a whip. All three, it seems, are ideal candidates to prime Bhola for the task of avenging his parents' deaths, and so follows a training montage taken directly from a Liu Chia-Liang movie (seriously, Bhola even has to run across those floating logs like in 36 Chambers of Shaolin), during which Bhola goes from being portrayed by a child actor to being portrayed by twenty-eight-year-old Jackie Shroff, despite the fact that his adopted uncles only age in that typically Bollywood, mild-graying-at-the-temples way.     Finally, Bhola's uncles take him to a temple to the god Shiva, where they bestow upon him his leather-heavy costume, a ring in the shape of Shiva's third eye (all the better to leave a distinctive mark on those he punches) and a replica of Shiva's weapon, the trishul -- or trident -- which he is to use to announce his arrival, striking terror into the hearts of those evildoers who are about to be on the receiving end of his wrath. At this, an eerie wind sweeps through the shrine, and his uncles tell him that the power he will be wielding will not be his own, but rather that of Shiva working through him. Now, whether this means that Bhola is now blessed with superpowers is unclear, as most of the crimefighting abilities he will display from this point on are in the form of the type of exaggerated punching and leaping around that we normally see from Indian action heroes -- only in their case without them being burdened with masks, capes and constricting head-to-toe leather uniforms -- though there are a couple of instances in which it appears that Bhola/Shiva can fly. Whatever his abilities may be, however, there is no doubt in my mind that Bhola/Shiva's most super power of all is his poetic way with a mortal threat, aided greatly by the fact that, whenever he puts on his costume, his voice automatically becomes equipped with its own echo unit. Thus is made even more grimly authoritative such pronouncements as "I will make you writhe so much that death will shiver looking at you." Or when, on another occasion, while trying to extract information from a recalcitrant goon, he intones ominously, "Even if Shiva goes to a cemetery, the corpses there get up and tell their names and addresses." Still, while generally a man of few words, Shiva does at times prove long-winded, as you'll no doubt find after hearing his little introductory speech being delivered for the umpteenth time. This, in response to his prey's panicked queries as to his identity, goes as follows: "The breeze that will extinguish the fire of injustice... The cure to poor men's pains... I am Shiva!"     Given the typically intricate plotting of Bollywood films, you might think of my above summarization of Shiva Ka Insaaf''s first act as being somewhat glib. But Shiva Ka Insaaf is far from typical in that regard, and shows an economy in its approach to storytelling that, unless you consider the circumstances, is a little surprising. Few Indian films of its era clock in, as Shiva does, at a mere two hours, but I imagine that this truncated length represents an attempt on the part of its producers to limit, to some extent, the expenses and technical complications involved in filming a movie in 3D. The resulting need to cram all of its business into what, to its makers, must have seemed like a very brief running time leads to a narrative that is uncharacteristically lean, and free of those many subplots and parallel storylines that make up the normal masala film. Now, I'd be lying if I said I didn't think the film could benefit from the introduction of some of those elements, but we should perhaps be grateful for what we have. After all, director Raj N. Sippy might not have been able to integrate those disparate elements as expertly as, say, Shekhar Kapur did with Mr. India, and we might have instead ended up with something as sprawling and unfocused as Toofan, a superhero movie so overburdened with plot that its superhero ends up being crowded off-screen for most of its length. Shiva Ka Insaaf may indeed boast a story that is little more than rote superhero boilerplate, but, as a frequent viewer of Indian films, I have to confess that it's nice to on occasion be let off easy: to part ways with a film after a non seat-numbing investment of time and without having to have kept track of all of its characters and tangents by way of copious notes. Anyway, with Bhola's superheroic transformation now complete, his uncles determine that it is time for him to go to The Big City, for that is where they have determined his parents' killer has migrated, despite them having no clue as to his identity. (Hey, my praising the movie's brevity doesn't mean that it doesn't sometimes come at the expense of sense.) To this end, they provide him with an entre to a job at a big city newspaper, where he is to work in the guise of a bespectacled, mild mannered reporter. Mind you, Jackie Shroff's take on this oft-essayed role ends up being an insult to bespectacled, mild-mannered reporters everywhere, as it involves a stuttering caricature of simple-mindedness and social retardation that borders on cretinism. Still, this somehow does not prevent the newspaper's beautiful female editor, Rekha (Poonam Dhillon) from giving him a job, thus setting us up for the inevitable triangle between Bhola, who falls hard for Rekha, and Rekha, who ends up falling even harder for Shiva. Now, as to the root of Rekha's attraction, I'd love to quote Batman and say "It's the car", but Shiva doesn't even have one, as evidenced in a later chase scene where he takes after a carload of thugs on a bicycle. (One article that I read about this film, written by a South Asian writer, cited this scene as singling out Shiva as being the most Indian of superheroes.) Must be the leather, then.     Meanwhile, we find that the intervening years have seen considerable upward mobility on the part of our old friend Jagan, as his relocation to the city has been accompanied by a transformation from grubby, scarf-wearing dacoit to white-suited, highball-swilling underworld kingpin, and has in turn necessitated him being re-christened with the cryptic but suitably sophisticated-sounding appellation "The Doctor". (No, he doesn't have a Tardis. Nerd.) Once Shiva has made his presence known around town, striking the appropriate amount of fear into its criminal underbelly, Jagan and his son, Vikram (Gulshan Grover), take it as their first order of business to eliminate him. And so begins the series of free-wheeling, violent encounters between Shiva and Jagan's army of goons that are essentially the very type of business you would presumably be watching a movie like Shiva Ka Insaaf for in the first place. And, unless you have expectations of gritty realism, you shouldn't be disappointed, as these scenes come replete with loads of unnecessary acrobatics, loudly resounding punches thrown directly at the camera, and Shiva skewering his adversaries with little mini trishuls that he throws with deadly accuracy. One of these aforementioned action set pieces involves Shiva being lured by Jagan's men to a warehouse filled with packing crates, where they then try to kill him by running him over with their cars. Inserted, at certain points, into the footage of real cars crashing through stacks of real crates -- I'm guessing, in order to somehow achieve the desired 3D effect -- are poorly matched shots of what are obviously toy cars crashing through stacks of miniature crates, which then fly out toward the camera. In like fashion, during the fight that ensues, whenever one of Jagan's henchmen is hurled or falls from the rafters, it is represented by an -- again, very obvious and, by all appearances, pocket-sized -- doll being dropped onto the camera. These are both pretty typical examples of the caliber of miniature work you see in older Bollywood movies -- going back as far as such methods were employed and extending forward to as late as the mid-nineties -- and it's something that, by virtue of its naive charms, I've found myself becoming completely obsessed with. Nothing makes me happier these days than to be watching some old Indian movie and suddenly see a scene such as those that I've described above play across the screen, and the shoddier it looks, the better.     I should point out, however, that the crudeness of those effects is not due to them being primitive by necessity. It wouldn't have required that much greater of an expenditure of cash or resources, if any, to make those models slightly more detailed, or to film them from an angle that would have created an illusion of scale. Nor, in my opinion, is it a matter of Bollywood effects crews of the day simply being inept. Rather, it's the result, I think, of a particular approach to special effects that puts less of a premium on realism, preferring instead to simply suggest the thing represented, while letting the effect itself be seen by the audience for the ingenious bit of trickery that it is. It's a self referential form of movie magic that, by its very obviousness, invites the audience to be gleeful participants in their own deception. It also both exemplifies and enables that promise of escape into a totally fabricated reality that, for many of us, makes Indian commercial cinema so irresistible. As for Shiva Ka Insaaf's most important special effect -- that is, its attempted illusion of three dimensionality -- I cannot offer an evaluation. The only way the movie can be viewed these days is in the stubbornly two dimensional format of cheapo Indian DVD, and, even if it were to generate enough interest to merit a screen revival in all its intended glory, that wouldn't be likely to occur on my shores. Still, anyone attempting to watch the movie even in its current format will do best to be advised of its origins, otherwise the near constant thrusting and hurling of objects into the camera with little or no narrative justification will prove pretty perplexing.     For myself, what was most interesting about all of that was how, unlike other 3D movies that I've seen, in which the effect was generally used to provoke in the audience a feeling of physical threat (ooh, watch out for that ping pong ball!), Shiva ka Insaaf is just as likely to tease its audience with temptation. There are any number of nasty looking weapons brandished at the viewer, but he or she is just as often -- or even more often -- tantalized with the offer of a plateful of tasty looking food, a handful of candy, or even a fistful of cash. When you consider that the majority of the film's audience would have come from the lower economic strata of Indian society, you have to wonder if Shiva Ka Insaaf didn't perhaps cross some line beyond Bollywood's mandate to provide wish fulfillment and enter territory where it could have been perceived as taunting, or even cruel. Still, I have to admit that the first thing that came to mind upon seeing one of those handfuls of colorful sweets being launched toward my face was the image of a theater full of shrieking kids joyfully leaping with arms outstretched toward the screen. And I imagine any parent would feel safe letting their child accept candy from Shiva ka Insaaf, as, aside from a couple of bloody moments and a very well-placed use of the word "shit" by Gulshan Grover, it's decidedly kid friendly. The drama never gets too intense, the overall look is bathed in that inimitable bright 1980s glow, and the score happily percolates with songs by R.D. Burman at his most lightweight and catchy. In other words, The Dark Knight this is not, and if you're looking for depth, you should have seen it when it was in 3D. However, if you're in the mood for some good-natured, if unremarkable, costumed horseplay with that ineffable whiff of spice peculiar to Bollywood, you could do much worse. Labels: Action: Superheroes, Bollywood, Stars: Jackie Shroff, Year: 1985 posted by Todd at 9:56 AM | 13 Comments Wednesday, April 04, 2007Naksha
DIGG THIS ARTICLE. 2006, India. Starring Sunny Deol, Vivek Oberoi, Sameera Reddy, Jackie Shroff, Suhasini Mulay, Navni Parihar, Liliput, Mridula Chandrashekar. Directed by Sachin Bajaj. Written by Milap Zaveri and Tushar Hiranandani.
For anyone who ever watched Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and was disappointed that, for all its over-the-top absurdities, it didn't feature a scene where Harrison Ford punches a midget and makes him fly across a field, then Naksha is the movie for you. Only it's not Harrison ford doing the punching; it's action cinema mainstay Sonny Deol. But hell, if anyone in the world is going to punch a midget and make him fly across a field, then it's going to be Sonny. Jackie Chan may have tried it at some point, but he's past the days of being able to do that anymore -- although he is an appropriate actor to bring up in our discussion of this movie, as although Naksha gets compared to Raiders of the Lost Ark (because all adventure films get compared to Raiders), the films it more accurately resembles would be the modern-setting adventure films of the late, great Cannon Studios, like Treasure of the Four Crowns or that thing where Chuck Norris and Lou Gossett, Jr. bicker and hunt for gold or whatever; or, perhaps even more closely, Naksha resembles the globe-trotting adventure antics of Hong Kong adventure films like Jackie Chan's two superb Armor of God films and Michelle Yeoh's entertaining but fabulously awful The Touch. In fact, if you took the armor from Armor of God (although, technically, we never even see the armor, do we?) and plopped it into the finale of The Touch, with a dollop of The Rundown thrown in for good measure, you'd basically have Naksha, the tale of two brothers and a tag-along hot chick who traverse the mountainous jungle wilderness in search of a secret temple and a sacred relic that could turn villain Jackie Shroff into an invincible superman, instead of turning him into the twin of French actor Jean Reno, which seems to be nature's own plan for Shroff.
Pretty boy Viveik Oberoi stars as Vicky, a fun-loving goofball who likes to spend his night at sexy dance clubs where the singers implore you to "shake what your momma gave you," even though poorly proofread subtitles insist that they are saying "shake what your momma told you" (and this after they tell is the lyrics to "Sway are "when the rubber rhythm starts to play"). I generally don't pick on subtitles, especially on DVDs that are marketed to a population that speaks something other than English. The inclusion of English subs is a nice consideration for the rest of us, and so I don't really complain when things stray from precise grammar. But still, man -- you should at least be able to properly subtitle in English the lines that are actually delivered in English. I only say this because I was all into shaking what my momma gave me, but then if I am only able to shake what my momma told me, I'm not gong to be allowed to shake anything other than Shake and Bake -- and going to a sexy dance club to shake a bag of raw chicken and crumblings is not what I'd consider getting my money's worth.
While hosting a bachelor party for his pal, Vicky meets dancer Riya (Sameera Reddy), who chastises him for being a low down dirty dog and such, and that's pretty much that. But when Vicky learns that his father, a famed archaeologist who died mysteriously some years before, may have been murdered while trying to protect a map to a sacred relic, he suddenly kicks himself into intrepid adventurer mode and sets out to find the lost relic -- which happens to be the armor and earrings worn by Karna during his legendary battle with Arjun, as described in the Hindu book The Mahabharata (which is a religious book in much the same way The Old Testament is: presumably -- and often verifiable -- historical events are mixed with or attributed to the intervention of gods and the supernatural). Whoever dons the armor and earrings will be rendered invincible.
Also searching for the armor is the dastardly Bali Bhaiyya, played by Bollywood veteran Jackie Shroff. Bhaiyya has no real back story other than the fact that he's the one who is responsible for the death of Vicky's dad. Exactly who Bhaiyya is, we never really find out, but adventure movies always have a villainous guy looking for the same treasure. In Raiders it was Belloq, in The Touch it was Count Dracula himself, Richard Roxburgh. And here it's Jackie Shroff. They're all pretty much the same: possessed of seemingly unlimited wealth (while the hero always seems to be rougher around the edges) and an unlimited number of incompetent but well-armed henchmen. Said henchmen quickly pick up Vicky's trail, and although he proves himself an able enough fighter (though the fights themselves can't stand up to similar fights in either The Touch or, most certainly, the mind-blowing fights -- few and far between though they may be -- in Armor of God), he is soon overpowered and find himself strung up in a vacant building, about to be eviscerated by Bhaiyya's goons. Until, that is, Sonny Deol crashes through the ceiling in slow motion and starts blowing cats away and punching them across the room.
Up until this point, the film has been pretty so-so, with a typical adventure film "discovering the plot" build up and a lead who was neither good nor bad, but simply a null value that wasn't going to engage me for the full film. But as soon as Sonny comes smashing through the building like The Incredible Hulk, wearing his old school Banana Republic safari man hat (some of you may remember when Banana Republic was entirely safari and adventure themed -- they had pretty awesome catalogs back then, digest size and printed on thick brown paper and full of stories about rum and clippers and such in between pictures of bush hats and waterproof duster jackets), well that's when the movie actually begins. From there on out, there's a few minutes sprinkled here and there dedicated to our main cast bickering with each other, but for the most part it's all Sonny beating the crap out of people and walking in slow motion and shit blows up around him. Sonny plays Veer, Vicky's long lost brother. It turns out that when Vicky called his mom to tell her where he was, she in turn called Veer and asked him to bring Vicky home. So Veer then used his incredible powers of teleportation to get to the remote little village where Vicky was being held captive, then used his incredible powers of ESP (or possible Google Maps) to locate the exact building in which Vicky was being held. Forget Karna's magic armor. Veer already seems possessed of near godlike omnipotence -- plus he can smash through buildings and punch guys so hard they fly across the room.
Vicky properly saved, Veer goes about the task of trying to bring the rascally younger brother home -- which proves difficult, as Vicky is nothing if not sneaky. Things get further complicated when, in the middle of the goddamned jungle far from home, the two brothers run into Riya, trapped in an out-of-control raft in a raging river. Apparently, she went on holiday and booked a white water adventure with an outfitter who takes women in their regular street clothes and plops them into a novelty-grade raft and sets them out into class IV rapids without partners or guides. The movie spends a little too much time with the trio monkeying about in the jungle (though sadly, and surprisingly, there are no hijinks or comedy bits involving actual monkeys), but that's forgivable as soon as Bhaiyya and his goons catch up and we get a parade of exploding trucks, kungfu fights, shotguns that seem to fire atomic bombs, and a scene in which the heroes run afoul of a tribe of pygmies that whip out some serious kungfu skills on Sonny (in a scene lifted wholesale from The Rundown -- even going so far as to hire an Ernie Reyes Jr. look-alike for the fight) before everyone makes up and gets drunk and dances through the village. And on the village. I don't know how happy the midget tribe was to have a big lug like Sonny Deol dancing on their roofs. I mean, if he can smash through the roof of full-size building, who knows what kind of damage he could do to the mud and grass hut of a guy named Liliput.
Eventually, everyone gets back to the business of trying to recover Karna's artifacts, leading to a big showdown in the hidden mountain temple, which is of course stuffed to the gills with booby traps (most of which are stolen from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade) and candles that light themselves. Naksha is a pretty dumb movie, but that doesn't mean that I didn't like it. I liked it a lot. But then, keep in mind that I like pretty much all adventure movies, even those Tomb Raider movies no one else liked (in fact, I loved those), and even Treasure of the Four Crowns. Naksha is better than Treasure of the Four Crowns, and better than The Touch, but it's still no Raiders of the Lost Ark. But then, nothing is (not even the other Indiana Jones films), so it's not really all that fair or useful to say a movie isn't as good as Raiders, which just might be the greatest adventure movie ever made. Still, measured against the rest of the world's adventure films (including those Antonio Margheriti adventure films starring David Warbeck), Naksha measures up pretty well despite the fact that the plot depends on a couple tremendously gigantic coincidences. At this point in the history of adventure films, however, I'm used to just looking the other way when a female from earlier in the movie shows up at random in a raft on a river in the middle of a remote jungle. Or when Sonny Deol travels at the speed of light to the location where his little brother is being tortured. Or the fact that everyone solves all the treasure map's clues by sort of staring off into the distance until "revelation music with chanting in it" plays and gives them the answer to the puzzle.
But there's a word for watching a guy sit for ten years trying to decipher clues on an esoteric map, and that word is "archeology." And since real archaeologists rarely get in kungfu fights with midgets or get involved in magical battles in secret temples, lets leave their work as the purview of The Discovery Channel, and let's let adventure films be populated by guys like Sonny Deol blowing up trucks and swinging around sawed off shotguns. You may notice that, while Viveik Oberoi is ostensibly the hero of this movie, I've barely mentioned him. That's because he's not even there. Not really. There's a reason Ajay Devgan is the guy everyone remembers from Company, even though Viveik was the main character, and there's a reason we're talking about Sonny a lot more in Naksha. Oberoi doesn't really strike me as a bad actor; it's just that he spends pretty much the entire movie mugging for the camera and going over-the-top in a way that makes him less like the hero and more like the hero's odious comic relief sidekick. Which leaves the actual hero work squarely on the beefy shoulders of workhorse Sonny Deol, where it belongs. Sonny is getting on in years but I still have absolutely no problem buying him as an action hero. I also have no problem at all buying Sonny as a legitimate tough guy. The trend these days is to feature uber-scultped male model types as action heroes. Sure the bodies look good in a gym, but do any of these lads strike you as someone you'd want to depend on in a fight? Who has your back: John Abraham or Sonny Deol? I'd be much happier knowing that a guy like Sonny Deol, with his treetrunk arms and a little bit of fat, has my back. When I reviewed Kamal Hassan's Abhay a while back, I compared Hassan's build to Joe Don Baker, or to many of the beefy redneck guys with whom I grew up. Ask 'em to show you their six pack, and they'll take you to the fridge. But you damn sure know that when push comes to shove, for all their beer guy and excess body fat, these guys are more than capable of hammering pretty much anyone into the ground. Sonny definitely falls in that category. When Viveik Oberoi punches someone, you sort of shrug and go, "Eh, it's a movie." But when Sonny punches someone, you believe that someone would fly across the room and through a wall.
The other person to pay attention to in this film is Jackie Shroff. Again, we see that while Viveik may have been seen as the handsome, young lead, this movie really belongs to the veterans. Where as Oberoi's over-the-top mugging comes off as lame, Shroff gets to go just as over the top as the villain of the piece, but he executes his scenery chewing turn with ace perfection. As I mentioned earlier, he is almost totally devoid of character. He is evil because the movie says he is evil, and because he is willing to gun down a village full of kungfu midgets. But beyond that, the movie pretty much relies on you recognizing a well established adventure film archetype. And honestly -- is his sinister plan really worth all this effort to prevent? The armor may make you invincible, but I still bet it would be pretty hard for one guy wearing heavy armor to conquer the entire world. I guess these villains never really expect to succeed in their mad schemes, so they don't think through the actual logistics of their proposed global conquest. But whatever the short-comings of his plan may be, Jackie still gives his all despite being in such a goofy movie. You could jettison Oberoi and Sameera Reddy from this film entirely and just leave the whole thing up to Deol and Shroff, and you'd probably be better off for it. Speaking of which -- I almost forgot Sameera Reddy was in this movie. She has absolutely no purpose other than to be the pretty girl and get captured every now and again by Shroff's goons. Her turn isn't really bad -- we're not talking Kate Capshaw here -- but there's certainly no point to it, either. So at least she's no Kate Capshaw, but she's also no Karen Allen. She looks good in the musical numbers though (of which there are only a couple), and I guess that's about all she's supposed to do.
Plotwise, you can pretty much guess that this movie isn't exactly a work of art. Coincidences abound, things happen for no reason, and people just seem to appear in places with very little effort or explanation, sort of like how Tony Jaa was always able to teleport to wherever he thought someone would be who might know where his elephants were in Tom Yung Goong. within the realm of adventure films, the plot is actually better -- or at least more sensical -- than many, but that's really not saying a lot. The plot isn't really the point here, though. The armor is just a MacGuffin that allows the movie to indulge in a parade of exploding trucks, shotgun battles, and kungfu fights. And in this capacity, Naksha delivers the goods in excess. Really, in excess. No truck explodes when five trucks could explode instead. And nothing just explodes when it could explode and shoot end over end, fifty feet up into the air. And no one gets punched and falls down when they could get punched and fly like a hundred feet back and through a wall or a tree or a windshield. The action is way over the top, well into the realm of the cartoonish, but it's still pretty good fun. It does make for a weird transition when the wacky action has serious consequences, but awkward shifts in tone are hardly the sole property of Naksha.
I've brought up both Armor of God and The Touch fairly often in this review, which probably doesn't mean a whole lot to people haven't seen either of those films. First of all, if you haven't seen Armor of God yet, you should. The bad slapstick comedy is more than made up for when Jackie starts kicking people so hard it makes them flip over backwards, hit their shins on the edge of a wooden table, then flip over backwards again before hitting the ground (you really just need to see it). It's the second most painful looking abuse Jackie has visited upon a stuntman (the first being in Police Story, when he kicks that dude on the escalator and makes him flip backward and land chest first on the edge of the metal stairs and then he bounces -- again, you have to see it to understand just how painful it looks). As for The Touch -- not so much. It's really pretty bad, even though I still watch it from time to time just because I like adventure movies, and the cinematography is nice to look at, and so is Michelle Yeoh. Naksha resembles The Touch in that it takes the traditional adventure film and attempts to graft some sort of cultural religious context onto the action. In the case of The Touch, it was Buddhism, and obviously here it's Hinduism. However, I'd say the lessons in Hinduism (taught to us in cartoon format) to be taught by Naksha are about as trustworthy as the American history taught to us by National Treasure, so I wouldn't use this movie in place of reading the actual historical texts. Actually, I would. But you shouldn't.
It's this, and the supernatural ending, that makes Naksha feel like The Touch, though I would qualify that statement by saying that Naksha is a much more enjoyable movie. Director Sachin Bajaj finds himself in that position for the first time, and even though it looks like he got the job through the ancient tradition of nepotism (his father is a film distributor in India and is listed as the producer of Naksha), Bajaj handles the job well. Not perfectly, but well. The pacing is OK, there's a little too much reliance on slow-motion during action scenes (though this is a global trend and not anything unique to Bajaj), and the cinematography (by Vijay Arora, who does have a lot of experience in the field) nicely captures the landscapes and contributes the exotic feel that is so important to a successful adventure film. Incidentally, The Touch was directed by a cinematographer-turned-director too, and while that film is frequently gorgeous, it's rarely good. If Bajaj was still a novice director, he at least had the good sense to surround him with a capable crew.
There's also a fair number of special effects which, for the most part, are realized fairly well. I don't know the exact budget of Naksha, but it sure wasn't small, and it showcases India's continually improving skill with CGI effects. Not everything is pulled off perfectly, but if I were to assume the budget to be roughly the same or slightly lower than The Touch, the effects in Naksha pretty much blow that film out of the water. That said, the CGI in The Touch was pretty awful, and Naksha doesn't even deserve to be dragged down to that level by an act of comparison. There are also a fair number of practical effects, as well as the kungfu fights. India, like pretty much the rest of the world, has never quite gotten the knack of filming a superb kungfu fight the way they can (or could) in Hong Kong. So there's no kungfu showdown of the quality we get at the end of Jackie Chan's Armor of God when Jackie takes on an entire monastery full of evil monks and a gang of leather-clad, high-heel wearing kungfu amazons. But then, even Hong Kong and even Jackie can't deliver fight scenes like that anymore, so that style of hyper-kinetic, bone jarring acrobatic kungfu seems to be the exclusive domain of Tony Jaa. That said, I wouldn't really expect to see someone with Sonny Deol's build going all 1980s Jackie Chan in a movie. Deol is a classic tough guy, and his job is to move slower but with thunderous power. The fight choreography in Naksha is OK, maybe slightly above average if you average out the quality of fight scenes all over the world. It does rely a lot on the gravity defying wirework that is so en vogue and has been so since the 90s in Hong Kong (though it was only discovered recently by the rest of the world). But since the fight scenes are, for the most part, possessed of a cartoonish over-the-top quality anyway, the wirework doesn't detract. And Sonny still looks solid just punch or kicking guys square in the jaw. I guess Viveik Oberoi gets in some action, too, but honestly -- is he still even in this movie? However well Deol might acquit himself in the action scenes, and however charismatic and likable a performer may be, one thing that does astound me about the man is that, after some twenty-odd years or so as a leading man, the guy still hasn't learned to dance. Naksha has only a few musical numbers, and Deol is involved in only two of them. And one of those isn't even in the movie. It's just a music video tacked on to the credits. And it's here that Deol's proficiency for the dancin' rears its ugly head. The other musical number in which he's involved is the drunken revelry with the tribe of kungfu midgets, and his job there is mostly to drink, smash some clay pots, and stomp around like a joyous madman. That he can do. But the non-sequiter final musical number pasted into the closing credits calls for actual dancing, and while Viveik and Sammera wriggle and writhe about with skill, Deol dances with all the grace, rhythm, and timing of Boris Karloff as Frankenstein's monster. I don't know how you stick around in Bollywood as long as Sonny has without learning how to dance, but somehow he manages. Still, when you think about it, if you have an action-packed kungfu adventure movie full of lost treasure, secret maps, and exploding trucks, do you want your hero to look good in the post-adventure dance number, or do you want him to look good kicking ass in the rest of the movie? Let Viveik and Sameera have their paltry moment to shine in the "freaky freaky Friday night" closing credit song, because Deol owns the rest of the film. Actually, the director must have realized that dropping Deol into the middle of a bunch of dancers for a music video was a bad idea, because eventually, he stops making Sonny try to dance and just lets him lounge about surrounded by hot, squirming chicks -- which is the way things ought to be for Sonny.
I should probably mention that the songs in this movie are awful. The score is pretty much the de rigueur "faux tribal" orchestration so common to modern adventure films, with lots of enthusiastic "Ho! Whoa ho!" chanting and percussion punctuated by flutes and that "haunting moaning" for moments of introspection and revelation. If you've seen an adventure film in the last fifteen years, you pretty much know the score. But the songs for the musical numbers -- my God! The song where they party with the pygmies is OK as it's just an extension of the score, and sounds like one of those "tribal music written by white guy" songs you hear on Globe Trekker. But then there's the "Shake what your momma gave you song" and the "freaky freaky Friday night" song -- there's a reason neither of these set the pop charts ablaze (as far as I can tell). The other song is performed when Jackie Shroff's standard issue "hot, evil mercenary chick in booty shorts" performs a little number for the goons, but honestly, I can't even remember how that sounds now, because all I can think about is that horrible "freaky freaky Friday night" song. Both Oberoi and Deol were in a bit of a slump when they starred in this film, and Naksha didn't do a whole lot to revive them. It also seems that Naksha had a pretty big budget, and adventure/treasure hunt films of this nature are pretty scarce in the overall cinematic landscape of Indian cinema. I guess Bajaj was hoping the stars and the relative uniqueness of the genre would translate into box office success. No dice, though it was a fun effort despite the box office failure and mixed reviews in India, ranging from "dumb fun" to "mindless idiocy and harbinger of the end of Indian cinema." Some felt that it wasn't "Indian" enough (for that perhaps they should watch the Sonny Deol film Indian -- I mean, how much more Indian can you get than to call your film Indian), or more accurately, that it was too Hollywood. This is a criticism that has been leveled at a lot of cinema these days -- from Hong Kong to Korea to France (could Sachin Bajaj become the Luc Besson of India??? -- I mean, I already cracked that Jackie Shroff looks like Jean Reno, so this is the next logical step), and personally, it doesn't fly with me.
We are no longer in an era of localized, regional cinema. That era died the day DVD stores and movie review websites went online. The cinema of one country has always influenced the cinema of another. Even if the audience wasn't aware, the filmmakers certainly were. Italian spectacle films of the silent era influenced American filmmakers, who set out to incorporate the larger-than-life opulence into their own films. And then the Technicolor spectacles of Hollywood during the 50s in turn revived spectacle filmmaking in Italy during the 1960s. Westerns became spaghetti westerns which in turn were heavily influenced by Japanese samurai films. And now, Hong Kong action films of the previous two decades heavily influence American films, which in turn influence Hong Kong films. Thanks to the interconnectivity of the Web, fans and even casual filmgoers are more aware of this global exchange than ever before. I mean, twenty years ago, when I first started watching Hong Kong action films, I never would have dreamed I'd hear my parents speak with familiarity about Chow Yun-fat or Michelle Yeoh. So yes -- Naksha has some very Hollywood elements. It also has some very Indian elements, as well as elements of Hong Kong cinema and Luc Besson's crop of French action films that have destroyed French film the same way Naksha and Dhoom have destroyed Indian cinema. I've never been a big fan of nation-state borders serving as barriers to artistic expression, and if the Internet has done anything positive besides deliver cheap, plentiful porn to the world, it's that it has facilitated the breakdown of walls between artists and fans across the world the way no fanzine or convention could ever dream of. So in this climate, what does it mean for a film or a genre to be "too Hollywood" or "not Indian enough?" Doesn't this confine film -- and all other forms of artistic expression -- to regionalized ghettos? If you film is an Indian film, it must fulfill these requirements, and it must not do these things. How is this mode of thinking in any way beneficial to filmmaking, or to art? How does this in any way encourage experimentation or evolution? At the same time, how does aping another country's cinema help cultivate the pieces of filmmaking that make your cinema unique on the global scene? Are we talking about genre topics, or technical aspects and camera tricks involved with filmmaking -- or does "too Hollywood" have less to do with the film and more to do with the moral values presented (for what it's worth, the moral values presented in Naksha include, "Indian mythology is awesome," "Don't conquer the world," and "stick by family")?
Of course, there's also the debate over what "destroyed such and such cinema" even means. Does applying techniques and values from Hollywood films somehow happen at the expense of obliterating that which makes another country's film unique? Isn't it possible to use the one without losing the other? I mean, Hollywood draws influence from all over the world, but no one is really saying that Hong Kong cinema destroyed Hollywood. In the end, "too Hollywood" is generally a criticism leveled at films by the same people who would still hate "Hollywood" even if they were American -- and here, Hollywood ceases to mean "Hollywood," or even "American" cinema, and instead is used as a synonym for "big, dumb popcorn movies," which are perceived by some as being automatically possessed of far less artistic merit or social value than smaller, quieter films. But then, this is again hardly an argument that restricts itself to India, or to any one country, and it has been raging pointlessly (though often times entertainingly so) since the birth of feature films. In the case of Naksha, the film did well in large cities but tanked everywhere else -- and since most of India is everywhere else, you can't really get by without it. Does a film like this represent a rift between urban areas, where perhaps people are more open to change, and rural areas, where something not identified as traditional is met with suspicion and hostility? If so, once again this is hardly a situation unique to India, but it does spotlight one of the great problems we face as our world becomes more connected and the varied cultures of the world continue to collide and meld into something new. It seems the more some people want to move ahead into this new arena, the more other people want to pull away from it. And both sides of this tug-of-war have plenty that justifies their position. I was originally -- before I derailed myself into this random thought exercise -- going to review this movie with nary a mention of "Bollywood" other than as a passing reference, because I think the role of a movie on the global scene is more important than its role in a restricted subsection, even one as large as Bollywood. Other people, with a greater sense of national pride, or a greater concern over maintaining the purity of their culture against outside influences, rather than embracing global accessibility and co-mingling, obviously don't feel the same way, and I'm not going to make proclamations on who is wrong or right, even though it's obvious where I stand. From day one of Teleport City, we have roamed the globe in search of cool and outlandish movies -- that's why a review of an Indian film that is too Hollywood contains so many references to Hong Kong films, Tony Jaa, Luc Besson, and David Warbeck. As far as I'm concerned, our regional cinema is planet Earth -- and I only use that limit because the shipping on movies from Io is so expensive and takes twenty-two years. Plus, man, who wants to watch a movie full of pretentious Ionians chain smoking and mumbling about how the view of Jupiter looming in the sky so perfectly embodies their personal existential crisis -- and from what I've seen of Ionian cinema, that's pretty much all there is, as the Ionian Luc Besson has not yet come around to destroy Ionian cinema. A review of a goofy, fun-loving flick like Naksha is hardly the best place for contemplation on the globalization and cross-pollination of culture, art, and entertainment, and this is certainly not meant as a defense of Naksha's sundry faults. It's hard to argue against anyone who claims this movie is stupid, because Naksha is pretty stupid. And that alone is enough to legitimately dismiss it as bad. I happen to have a different standard, though, and the movie was OK in my book. But what we're talking about here is not whether the film is good or bad, but whether it is too foreign or not, and whether such arguments have much meaning anymore.
I think it's valuable to look at a film in terms of its native cultural and industry context. It's important to understand the prevailing trends and cultural mores from which a film emerges. And in many ways, although people who frown upon pop culture are loathe to admit it, you can learna lot about people by learning about what people like in the pop culture and entertainment. There's no way to understand Indian films without making some effort to at least get the basics of Indian film and cultural history under your belt. At the same time, I also think it's important to remove films from that context and look at them as members of a more globalized cinema scene. In that sense, whether or not Naksha is "Bollywood enough," whatever that may mean, is hardly an important question for me. I don't care, to be honest. Others may care a lot, and that's just a matter of your point of view on things. I, personally, am not a "fan of Bollywood;" I'm a fan of film, wherever it may come from. But this debate probably deserves a more respectable forum than Naksha as reviewed by Teleport City, so I'll lay it to rest here unresolved. What matters most to me right now is, how does Naksha measure up against its contemporaries in adventure cinema from the rest of the world? And honestly, despite the obvious script gaffs and Oberoi's mugging, Naksha holds up pretty well against the rest of the pack -- but depending on how dumb you think the rest of the pack is, you may enjoy this film a lot less than I did. It's got a playful sense of adventure, decent pacing, some fun fights, nice locations, solid veterans in Shroff and Deol, an appropriately supernatural blow-out for the finale, and lots of people tearing about in Land Rovers. Theater audiences may have met the film with a resounding, "meh," if they even took the time to do that, but I have to say, I really had fun. Plus you know: kungfu fight between Sonny Deol and a guy who was like four feet tall. Crap. I think I like the "freaky freaky Friday night" song... Labels: Action: Adventure, Bollywood, Musicals, Stars: Jackie Shroff, Stars: Sonny Deol, Stars: Vivek Oberoi, Year: 2006 posted by Keith at 6:06 PM | 7 Comments Monday, November 27, 2006Boom Digg this article. 2003, India. Starring Amitabh Bachchan, Jackie Shroff, Gulshan Grover, Padma Lakshmi, Madhu Sapre, Katrina Kaif, Javed Jaffrey, Zeenat Aman, Seema Biswas, Bo Derek. Written and directed by Kaizad Gustad.Whenever someone names a predictable title like Plan 9 from Outer Space or Robot Monster or Yor, the Hunter from the Future as one of the worst movies of all time, my inevitable response is that if they think that's one of the worst movies of all time, then they obviously haven't seen enough movies. Certainly not enough to be making such bold proclamations such as naming it one of the worst of all time. Now as you can imagine -- I've seen some bad films in my time. Not just, "so bad it's good" bad, or "guilty pleasure" bad; no, I mean "gnaw your own paw off to escape the trap" bad. I mean "I'd rather gut myself and strangle myself with my own innards than watch another second of this film" bad. More than all that -- I mean "boring" bad. As I've said before, there is no greater sin in cinema, in my opinion, than being boring and tedious. I can take pretty much anything else. Hit me with your worst shot. But boring? That takes me out of the game almost instantly.
The 2003 mega-budget disaster Boom has a reputation as one of the worst movies in Bollywood history. That's one hell of a claim, I tell ya what. And Boom is certainly an utter and complete fiasco of a movie. There isn't a single competent second in the entire overlong running time. Despite a bloated budget, international locations, the glam and glitz of the fashion world, and ample displays of writhing female flesh, the movie still manages to look ugly and grubby. The cinematography is mishandled, the direction never attains any sense of pacing, and the script seems to have been assembled in cut-up Burroughs style using the scripts of the complete filmography of Andy Sidaris as the source material. And the acting? Man, there's no word to even describe it. No adjective has yet been invented that satisfactorily expresses just how phenomenally atrocious the acting is. It's somewhere below the worst acting in micro-budget horror films -- and not the relatively competent (by comparison) modern micro-budget horror film. I'm talking, these people may one day achieve the level of acting we saw in Splatter Farm. You can see where I'm going with this, can't you? Everything in this movie is so inexpressibly, mind-blowlingly awful that Boom becomes one of the greatest movies I've ever seen. When I reviewed Asambhav, I said that as bad as the film was, I still thought fans of bad action films should see it because it was so absurd. In the case of Boom, however, let me state straight-out: absolutely, under no circumstances, should you take my advice regarding Boom. Do not listen to me. No matter what you hear, no matter how much I scream and beg, you must not listen to me, because I'm going to say, "Dude, you haven't seen Boom? You have to see Boom. It's one of the worst movies I've ever seen. It's awesome." It's the equivalent of, "Oh man, this milk has gone sour. It's awful. You have to smell it." Boom is that foul yet enticing carton of spoiled milk that gets shoved to the back of the refrigerator and forgotten until one day, you notice it there behind the half-finished jar of BBQ sauce and the half-dozen Coronas, can't help but open it and take a whiff, and then realize with horror that the rotting, curdled stench overpowers all else in the house and demands, as if possessed by some otherworldly power of mind control, than you immediately rush out and find others to share in the putrid rot. Boom is the cursed video from Ring. Once you've seen it, you will feel the overwhelming urge to make someone else see it, lest your head explode, the last image in your mind being a buff guy in giant nylon raver pants doing the pelvic thrust and shouting, "come on, baby, yeah!"
What really pushes Boom into the realm of the sublime and makes Krishna himself weep sweet, sweet tears of humiliation, is the fact that the film is stuffed with brand name talent. Eternal king of Bollywood cinema and de facto Prime Minister of India, Amitabh Bachchan, is on hand looking resplendent in his white suits. Queen of Bollywood and the unchallenged queen of 70s Hindi cinema, Zeenat Aman, came out of retirement to appear in this film. Jackie Shroff took time out to appear in the film as well. These are actual actors -- which is more than can be said for the rest of the cast. Seeing these proven, seasoned veterans showing up in this film, some after a fifteen plus year retirement, only to have the film be so jaw-droppingly horrendous is, honestly, as sweet as magic gumdrops. The goofiness begins right at the concept: during a flashy fashion show, two models get into a cat fight, resulting in a pile of stolen antique diamonds falling out of the hair of one of the models. You might think that if you were smuggling stolen diamonds, you wouldn't stick them in your hair and bring them to your fashion show, but really, that'll be the least of your concerns once this film gets rolling. The smuggler-model flees and goes into hiding, which means the gangsters who stole the diamonds have only one lead to finding them: the other model.
The other model, Anu (beauty pageant veteran Madhu Sapre) lives with her two model friends, Sheila (model turned Salman Rushdie wife and spice food spokeswoman, Padma Lakshmi) and Rina (Katrina Kaif). There is, however, absolutely no reason to remember their names. Just remember that there's the tough one, the smart one, and the dumb one. Of these three characteristics assigned to each of the women, only one of them is communicated onscreen with any hint of believability. I will not be handing out any prizes for correctly guessing which one it is. The brainy one communicates her braininess by continuously yammering out figures to the tenth decimal place, though they stopped short of having her constantly pushing up a pair of big-rimmed glasses (she does wear glasses in one scene, though). The tough one communicates toughness by emoting as little as possible. And the dumb one effectively communicates her idiocy by, it seems, just being herself. All three of these women are models. None of them are actresses. It shows. The gangsters (middle man Jackie Shroff, whose character consists of "he snorts coke," and big cheese Amitabh, whose character consists of "he reads comic books") send goofball muscleman Boom Shankar (Javed Jaffrey, the only legitimately entertaining part of the whole movie) to kidnap the models and give them a choice: either they perform fashion shows until the cost of the diamonds is paid off, or they become whores until the price of the diamonds is paid off. The girls, of course, decide for a third option which consists of using their incredible talents to beat the most dangerous criminal in the entire world at his own game. Keep in mind that the last plan they hatched was to keep anyone from finding out about the fashion show debacle by sending their maid out to try and purchase every single issue of the India Times in Mumbai before anyone else saw it. Another of their plans will involve robbing a bank while wearing masks of their own faces, which I have to say, is absolutely fucking brilliant.
A lot of the criticism that was leveled at Boom in the Indian press at the time of its release dealt with how foul-mouthed and crude the movie was, and I guess by Bollywood standards, it is foul-mouthed and crude. But I'm an American, damnit, and I say to the people who though the worst thing about this movie was that it was a tad dirty that there are plenty of other things that make this movie worth ripping to shreds. So many, in fact, that I'm almost overwhelmed, like a kid in a candy store, if the candy store didn't stock Now and Laters and Laffy Taffy but did have shelves stuffed with giggling killers in raver pants and Amitabh Bachchan in a little novelty kiddie car. I'll start with the writing, assuming any of this movie was actually written down at any point. Back in the late 1990s, there was a trend in Hong Kong action films of filming the movie, or at least a large chunk of it, in English. Ostensibly, this was done to give it a hip, international edge. Practically, speaking, however, it resulted in films packed with some of the worst acting and most nonsensical dialogue ever as actors who often had limited English-language skills read English-language lines written by scripters with limited English-language skills. The result, perhaps best epitomized by Gen-Y Cops and China Strike Force, was the creation of an entirely new language, one comprising of English words but not English sentences. Everyone was stilted in their delivery (often because they were unsure of their language skills, but just as often because, although the actor was a native English speaker, they were just really bad, or didn't give a damn), which only augmented the fact that the dialogue completely failed to reflect any semblance of actual spoken English. No one talks like that, or says those things. And English speakers listening to the English dialogue actually have a better chance of deciphering the meaning of the Chinese language dialogue. It was even better when these lines were read by people you know speak English fluently. Michael Wong (the world's most dedicated bad actor), Daniel Wu, Mark Dacascos, Coolio -- these people speak English. But I guess they just weren't that interested in reading the lines and changing them on the fly to something more akin to real English. And so a new and baffling mutant language has been born, with roots that can be traced back to bad English subtitles in old Hong Kong films and the similarly baffling mangling of English that happened when Italian films got dubbed.
At no point is the lack of understanding of the nuances of the English language more evident that when the characters start cursing or talking in slang. Back in the day, I worked at a college bookstore that served as the headquarters for the university's "English as a second language" courses, so everyone had to buy their books from us. One of the titles required for an advanced English class one year was something like, "Speaking Real English," and it was meant to teach students who had learned formalized "language class" English how to speak and understand the real thing as used by real people. And I felt so, so sorry for any poor kid from China or Ghana who picked up this book and went to a party a week later spouting off hip, 1990s slang like, "Hey my jive turkey brother, what's rad with you, Holmes," (actual sentence from the book). It was like some horrible joke a bunch of racists played. "If we publish a fucked up book of slang, then Chinese kids will get their asses kicked at parties." Anyway, whenever one of these movies starts to have their characters curse in English, it sounds like something out of that book (and I'm sure my "How to Speak Saucy Japanese" book is just as bad in the other direction). Effectively cursing requires an intimate knowledge of the language. I know people who are offended by cussin' fall back on the tired old, "it's a sign of a limited vocabulary, my jive Holmes street brother," chestnut, but I disagree. Being an effective curser is a sign that you have truly mastered the nuances of a language. I don't mean just blunt "screw you" stuff; I mean the really complex, foul-mouthed poetry. Listen to a cranky old Chinese woman curse out another cranky old Chinese woman who snaked her seat on the subway. That's a stream of misanthropic beauty that rages with the poetic grace, unbridled rage, and stinky pollution of the Yangtse River itself. I could never do that. At best, I can muster a feeble, "Hwai dan" or "ma bi," but that's mostly going to amuse people rather than infuriate them. Hell, I'm not even sure I'm saying it right. I don't speak Chinese fluently, and as a result, I can't curse in Chinese. It's no different for English.
But that never stops these movies from trying. And Boom really tries hard, peppering the dialogue with a steady stream of inappropriately used inappropriate words. throwing English words and sentences into the mix has been common in Hindi cinema for decades, but this is the rare instance where English is the primary language of the film. It's like a bunch of little kids who have just learned some bad words but haven't mastered their proper application, but that doesn't stop them from using them non-stop in the most comically unsuitable fashion. It's also kind of desperate, like when a comic book proves it is mature and adult by having superheroes who say "fuck." Rather than being cool or tough, it just sounds pathetic, like a meek whimper for attention. Look at me! I'm tough! I am! Far from setting the film apart as edgy or international, the foul-mouthed English-heavy dialogue in Boom is the spoken word equivalent of a greasy fat kid with a bowl haircut and "fat guy lisp" showing off his bo staff skills at a comic book convention. I know some of the people in this movie probably know some English (actually, I assume that Amitabh knows everything about everything) but none of them show any skill with it in their acting. Which brings us to the acting. Our three female leads are dreadful. It's almost inconceivable that stars in a major, professional film could be this bad. I mean, I know you people think Tom Cruise is bad, or Paul Walker, or even Paris Hilton. Forget it. This is a whole different level of game. Watching these three idiots try to act is going to make you realize how good those other supposedly bad actors really are.
But these gals have an excuse, right? They're models. They were cast for their looks, not their talent. Even this baffles me, though. Because, as I said to a friend, only in Bollywood could you eschew your usual pool of actresses, cast three supermodels in your movie, and still come up with women who are less attractive that your average Bollywood actress. Come on, man. Bollywood actresses are hot. I don't think there's any other film industry in the world that can boast so many gorgeous, and often genuinely talented, actresses as Bollywood has at its disposal. Bollywood has so many beautiful actresses from which to chose that it almost becomes humdrum. Yes, we know Aishwarya Rai is the most beautiful woman on the planet. We get it. Let's move on (actually, Manisha Koirala is the most beautiful woman in the world, but that's another debate entirely). Given that, why would a casting director even think to look to the throng of wannabe supermodels for their leads? I mean, nothing against these three women, but why go for second-rate looks and acting talent when you have so many better prospects? Maybe every name actress in Bollywood read this script and turned it down. Well, every one of them except Zeenat Aman. Zeenat ruled the 70s, and a good portion of the 80s, starring as a kungfu ass-kicker alongside Amitabh in movies like Don and The Great Gambler, along with being an industry-challenging pioneer who fought for substantial, strong female roles, and even starred in some of the first non-arty Bollywood productions to not feature musical numbers. She was a risk-taker and an ass-kicker, and she looked better than anyone else while she was doing it. In 1989, she retired from filmmaking (though she is credited with an appearance in the 1999 film Bhopal Express, but I have no idea how substantial her role in that film was). Whatever the case, that's more or less a decade and a half of virtual absence from movie screens.
And then, in 2003, someone -- or something -- convinced her that she should make a glorious comeback, and that this movie would be the one. It's sort of like if Hank Aaron came out of retirement in 1982 but did it by playing for the Toledo Mudhens in a game against the Norfolk Tides. Seriously, what the hell? What was it about this movie that suckered Zeenie Baby in? I can only assume that her old buddy Amitabh approached her with piles of cash, keys to a new Aston Martin, and a gun to the head of her firstborn. Nothing less than that could explain her agreeing to appear in this movie. I mean, Amitabh may be the emperor of the universe (a throne vacated upon the death of Testuro Tanba earlier this year), but he's also got a case of the Michael Caines (or the Tetsuro Tanbas). He'll appear in any damn movie. They probably could have gotten him to be in Splatter Farm if they'd asked. Amitabh, especially Amitabh from the late 1990s on, is a seemingly permanent fixture in awful movies, the go-to guy when you want to trick people into thinking there might be some redeeming factor to your movie. So seeing him in Boom was embarrassing, but it certainly wasn't unexpected or out of the ordinary. But Zeenat? She got out of bed for this? Notably, however, in her one brief musical scene (she slinks around a posh office to the tune of Hare Krishna Hare Rama, from the movie of the same name, which also happens to be the one that made her a cinema icon), she manages to be sexier than all three of the vapid young leads combined. Zeenie Baby, you're still tops in my book.
As for Amitabh, the former coolest man in Hindi cinema still looks cool, with his white hair and white suits, but he was apparently bitten at some point by a radioactive Robert DiNiro, giving him the proportional strength and speed for destroying prior respectability as the actual Robert DiNiro. Boom is Amitabh's Bullwinkle. Watching the scenes where he tools around a toy store in one of those novelty kiddie cars, or when he frolics down the beach shouting "Bo!" as an imaginary Bo Derek emerges from the water (played by the actual Bo Derek, in a pointless five-second cameo), and you'll start to wonder why anyone thought this guy was cool. Trust me, he is, and one need only return to the Fertile Crescent that is Don to be reminded of how cool Amitabh is when he's not in a movie as wretched as Boom. Jackie Shroff just sort of mumbles his way through his lines. The only guy really putting any oomph into his role is Javed Jaffrey as Boom Shankar (is that a Young Ones joke?), the shiny-shirt wearing professional hitman who is easily the least professional professional hitman I've ever seen. He bugs out his eyes, barks nonsensical lines, and generally seems to at least be enjoying the time he gets to spend in the company of three supermodels, one of whom (Madhu Sapre) looks sort of like a tired, past-his/her-prime transvestite in many scenes (shallow insult, but frankly, if you are going to try and get by on your looks, then I get to criticize you based on those looks).
Shankar's not even that likable, but he's still the most likable character in the movie. The three leads are nightmares. I can't imagine anyone having the slightest bit of sympathy for them. They're annoying, shallow bitches when the movie begins, and when it ends, they're still annoying, shallow bitches. Every time they open their mouths, the results are shrill and grating. I spent the whole movie wishing that Boom Shankar would just kill all three shrieking harpies, and we could move on to some other movie that was merely "incredibly bad," instead of "nightmarishly atrocious." And the scene where the three girls get in their post-robbery tiff -- that's got to be one of the single worst scenes ever filmed. Oh man. You know, I thought I was going to end up telling you that this movie is so awful, you really should see it. I was wrong. This movie just irritates me. It's sloppy and boring, and nothing makes any sense. The cinematography is ugly and awkward -- scenes that should be well-framed are always a bit off, so that everything looks like it was shot by a first time camera operator with a permanent crick in his neck. The lighting makes everything look grubby. And what's the deal wit the sound recording? Not that I really want to hear it, but come on! If you're going to have dialogue, even idiotic and nonsensical dialogue, at least mix it in a way that it can be heard. All the dialogue sounds like it was recorded with the actors standing across the room from the microphone.
This movie cost a ton and ended up being one of the most expensive films in Bollywood history. I have no idea where that money went. It's certainly not on the screen. The costumes are boring. There's nothing lavish about the production. The sets are dull and plain. I assume that a vast amount of the cash went to convincing Zeenat, Jackie, and Amitabh to show up for it. Otherwise, I have no idea where all that money went. Oh, it's just awful. Everything is awful. The bank robbery? It's the worst. Somehow, we're supposed to be convinced that these girls have been transformed into bad-ass robbers by Boom Shankar, despite all the evidence to the contrary in the movie. And come on, this movie was made in 2003 -- there is absolutely no excuse for having your characters hold their guns sideways. That's so 1999. The bank robbery is also the moment in which the film indulges in its one full musical number, and it's as sloppy and poorly staged as everything else in the movie. I'm starting to lose myself in just how bad this movie really is. Let's come back to the major criticism leveled at this film by many members of the public in India and the Indian film industry: it's dirty. And yes, it does feature the rare on-the-mouth kiss. And yes, there are a lot of poorly-used English curse words. And yes, boom Shankar makes dick jokes. But the girls aren't as hot as the average Bollywood actress, and there's not nearly as much sexual suggestiveness or skin on display as you can get from the average Bollywood masala. If you are going into the film looking for cheap titillation and skin and all that lewd perversion some people seemed to see, you're actually going to be pretty disappointed. Likewise if you are looking for action. The only action scene is the bank robbery, and the action there consist of nothing but three models wobbling in on high heels and yelling "Everybody get the fuck down!" over and over until they finally make a clean getaway via a slow-moving RV. The rest of the movie is just a bunch of people sitting around in an office or a living room, having conversations that don't make any sense. At no point is there a pay-off to any of the tedium. Even the finale is a total bore.
Boom -- it's really just incredibly awful. I like to always try to think up something positive to say about any movie, and with Boom, about the best I can come up with is, "It's only an hour and forty minutes long." That's practically non-existent by Bollywood standards, and even at that brief running time, you're going to be checking the watch and hitting the fast-forward button. I thought, when I began writing this review, that I was going to tell people this movie was so awful that you should see it, but now, you know what? Fuck Boom. See this movie if you need a solid example of how bad a movie can be. I alluded earlier to this being sort of the Bollywood equivalent of an Andy Sidaris movie without actual nudity, but that's not being fair to Andy Sidaris. Boom wishes it could be as bad as an Andy Sidaris film, but it's so much worse. Someone watched Boom at some point and must have realized how awful it was, because the movie was quickly retooled to be marketed as a "comedy." This smacks of a preemptive attempt to derail inevitable criticism by hiding behind the aegis of "parody." But it's not parody. It's just a really, really horrible failure of an action film that was ret-conned into being a comedy. But just as it's not a successful action movie, it's also not a funny comedy. It's not anything but a dreadful, boring mess. I can hardly even believe a professionally made movie can be this bad. Labels: Action, Bollywood, Stars: Amitabh Bachchan, Stars: Jackie Shroff, Stars: Zeenat Aman, Year: 2003 posted by Keith at 6:25 PM | 15 Comments |
|
 |
