REVIEW 741: DRIVE

Release date:	November 1, 2019
Director:	Tarun Mansukhani
Cast: Language:	Sushant Singh Rajput, Jacqueline Fernandez, Boman Irani, Pankaj Tripathi, Vibha Chibber, Sapna Pabbi, Vikramjeet Virk Hindi

So it is here at last: the first direct-to-Netflix release by Karan Johar’s Dharma Productions. 

Produced by KJo, written and directed by Tarun “Dostana” Mansukhani, starring Sushant Singh Rajput and Jacqueline Fernandez, Drive is a thriller that follows the tried-and-tested pattern of a heist within a heist within a heist. Film industries across the world have explored this genre to fun effect. India’s Hindi film industry a.k.a. Bollywood proved that it has the chops for wheels-within-wheels-within-wheels crime back in 1978 with the iconic Don starring Amitabh Bachchan, more recently with Abbas Mustan’s Race in 2008 and the SRK-Farhan Akhtar Don films in 2006 and 2011.

The very least you would expect after seeing the poster, the credits of Drive and reading its summary is that it would deliver spadefuls of excitement, pretty people in pretty clothes and swish special effects. Well, lower those expectations right away. 

Sure, Rajput and Fernandez look hot in the film, both have tremendously fit bodies, and if you think back on the story, the original concept probably had the potential to become a slick cops-and-robbers drama. At first it does seem like Drive might prove to be an entertainer but the narrative, like the special effects, steadily declines as the film progresses. The SFX are overall so downmarket that it is hard to believe Drive comes to us from Dharma, whose signature for at least two decades has been glossy visuals. 

Not that anything else in the film is of high calibre. Well suited to the SFX are the generic storytelling style, the overall ordinary production quality, inconsistent audio, a stand-out acting loophole and glaring lack of logic that, among other things, translates into Delhi roads – notorious in reality for their traffic jams – obligingly emptying themselves out to accommodate high-speed car races and chases at all times of day and night. 

The reason why Drive is set in India’s capital city is because a robbery is being planned in Rashtrapati Bhavan. The primary players in this game are a group of car racing aficionados, an outsider who infiltrates their inner circle, a criminal known simply as King – you know, like Don in Don – and corrupt bureaucrats. 

The opening race in Drive is reasonably well done, the song ‘n’ dance that follows is kinda nicely choreographed by Adil Shaikh, and Jacqueline Fernandez has some cute moves in it. From then on it is a downhill descent. 

Gaping gaps in the plotline recede into the background in the face of ordinary car chases that routinely look plastic and an embarrassingly low-brow extended climax that feels like the work of an entry-level animation student. Lightning McQueen’s universe appeared more real than the vehicles and roads in several of this film’s scenes. 

Much has been made of the fact that a portion of Drive was filmed in Israel, making it the first Bollywood venture to be shot there. The media has reported that the film was also partly funded by that country’s government. The true mystery here is why the Israeli sarkar thought this film would be a good ad for them in India. Be assured that what Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna is to New York City or Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara is to Spain, Drive is absolutely not to Tel Aviv. At best the city is treated like the geographical equivalent of an ‘item’ number chucked mindlessly into a bad Bollywood film – it springs up out of the blue and it has no relevance whatsoever to the storyline.

In the face of such mediocrity, analysing the screenplay almost feels pointless. But a job is a job, so consider this. Without giving anything away let us just say the only way the masterplan revealed in the climax of Drive could possibly have worked is if no one in Rashtrapati Bhavan’s entire security department checked a critical character’s ID carefully for several days. 

Granted that this point arises only in retrospect, and granted that this person could have had the world’s top creator of fake IDs backing them, so instead consider this question that comes up quite early in the film. (Some people may consider this paragraph a spoiler) The loot could not have been where it was unless other critical characters managed to easily beat the security system in the Indian President’s residence for what must have been months, if not years. If you have visited Rashtrapati Bhavan and experienced the tight restrictions in place in the complex, you would know how ridiculous this is. How the crooks aced the system is never explained, we are simply expected to accept that they did because we are told so. (Spoiler alert ends)

Or consider this. Person X says in the end that they were expecting to be deceived by Person Y. But in an earlier scene when X realised they had been double-crossed by Y, the facial expression – clearly visible in close-up – is one of shock and not at all “oh well, I knew this was coming”.

Or this. In a key scene in Drive, a quartet of cars zips through an airport runway and the occurrence seems not to be a blip on the radar of Air Traffic Control (ATC), the local police or the news media at that point or for the two months that the story continues. This writing laziness is intentional – having ATC, the police and press notice the breach would have been too much of an inconvenience since it could have meant the kingpins of the gameplan being discovered before the writer wanted them to be, you see. 

Or consider this. Snazzy cars with the words “Delhi Police” emblazoned on them zoom about the city, offering evidence of how little the team of Drive knows the reality of the capital’s ill-equipped force. 

As for the acting, well, Pankaj Tripathi does lend a Pankaj Tripathi touch to his character, but really, how is one to seriously and fairly critique the performances in such a film?

For a moment let us set aside thoughts of the cast though, and Johar, Netflix and Israel. Let us take that moment to mourn the fact that this sub-standard action flick has been made by the same director who gave us Dostana, which, notwithstanding its resemblance to a Hollywood film, was, in its own way, pathbreaking in the Indian social context. From Dostana to Drive is such a fall.

Rating (out of five stars): 1/2

CBFC Rating (India):	None
Running time:	119 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/drive-movie-review-sushant-and-jacquelines-prettiness-and-an-under-par-heist-come-wrapped-in-awful-sfx-7588511.html

Photograph courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive_(2019_film)

REVIEW 713: SUPER 30

Release date:	July 12, 2019
Director:	Vikas Bahl
Cast: Language:	Hrithik Roshan, Mrunal Thakur, Pankaj Tripathi, Sadhana Singh, Virendra Saxena, Aditya Srivastava, Vijay Verma, Amit Sadh Hindi

From a Hindi film industry that has for decades now barely acknowledged the existence of India’s caste system, it is quite something to see two films rooted in caste discrimination – Article 15 and Super 30 – within a span of a fortnight. Let us take a minute to celebrate that change.

The question now is this: should we be so grateful to artists who bring up issues rarely visited by their colleagues that we let their faux pas, prejudices, poor research and poor storytelling pass? Or do we call them out on their follies in the hope that they are genuinely invested in their chosen themes, and will try to do better next time?

The answer is: say it like it is. Of course a star as major and glamorous as Hrithik Roshan opting to play a character from a lower caste is a turning point in this insular industry which has long assumed, as it once did about women protagonists, that heroes from marginalised communities can only yield tragic weepy tales that have no place in the mainstream. What is lovelier still is that Super 30 is based on the uplifting story of a real-life achiever. That it comes to us at a time when any critique of caste is slammed as being “Hinduphobic” makes it courageous too.

No doubt these are laudable starting blocks. But Super 30 dilutes itself in multiple ways. First, the brown makeup used on Roshan for the role of Anand Kumar signals a stereotypical understanding of what it means to be lower caste, offering us Hindi cinema’s caste equivalent of the white Western world’s brownface. “He doesn’t look Dalit” was a criticism levelled at Prakash Jha for casting Saif Ali Khan as a Dalit in Aarakshan. Those pointing fingers should have told us what that “look” is since Dalit is not a race or ethnicity but a pan-India social categorisation signifying extreme ostracism and a forced adherence to certain professions. If Team Super 30 was indeed convinced that Hrithik’s light complexion would never be found on a member of a lower caste, it is worth asking why they did not go in search of a dark-skinned actor instead of bottles of brown make-up, because the caking up of a well-known face is distracting, to say the least. And if their argument is that all they wanted was for Roshan to resemble the man he is playing as closely as possible, well then, videos and photographs of the real Anand Kumar will tell you that he looks nothing like the Bollywood hottie with or without makeup, so that claim does not hold water.

Second, while Super 30 is gutsy off and on with its caste references, it is also simultaneously hesitant in addition to betraying a limited understanding of this deeply entrenched social dynamic.

So, bravo for showing a character from a dominant group proclaim in Anand Kumar’s presence that social divides are written into ancient scriptures and epics, since this is in truth how upper castes continue to justify their claims to supremacy (the Censor Board forced the producer to dub over the word “Ramayan” in that scene, and what we hear is the person saying “Rajpuraan”). Bravo for having a poor, lower-caste postman tell a post-office employee named Trivedi to quit his fossilised thinking and realise that we live in an age when talent, not heredity, will determine who rules. Bravo for the poor man who describes an inconsiderate medico as a “donation-waala doctor”, because those opposed to SC/ST reservations use “quota-waala” as an epithet and claim that meritocracy is their only concern but do not raise similar objections to academic institutions in which privileged classes can buy admission. Bravo.

(Applause fades) There is no explanation though for why Anand’s caste is never specified in the film but only implied through conversations in more than one scene. It remains the elephant in the room whose presence has been alluded to but not stated in black and white. That Which Must Not Be Named. But why?

Writer Sanjeev Dutta also confuses class with caste when he shows the snobbery of Anand’s upper-caste girlfriend’s father melt away as soon as the boy starts making big money. The point about caste is its permanence, the fact that you cannot rise up a ladder and shrug off the label that was pasted on you at birth even if you exit poverty and illiteracy through hard work. Considering that the Dad had already had a conversation with Anand in which he condescendingly referred to “your people”, it seems unlikely that this man would forget his contempt overnight because that is not what we see happening in the real India.

Super 30 is based on the life of mathematician-educationist Anand Kumar from Bihar. This is a highly fictionalised account, as you will gather if you read media reports about Kumar starting from the 2000s. It is also an account that steers clear of all question marks raised in the media about Kumar, but since those question marks themselves are murky and require a thorough investigation by an unbiased reporter on the ground, I am not going into a comparison between the film and reality.

Roughly speaking, Anand in the film, like the real guy, is a mathematical genius whose academic brilliance gets him admission in Cambridge University. His impoverished family cannot raise the funds to send him there though. A chain of circumstances leads Anand to a coaching institute for IIT JEE aspirants where he becomes a star teacher and starts raking in good money. However, he decides one day to give up his increasingly comfortable life and set up a free coaching school for under-privileged children where he will train 30 chosen ones for the IIT entrance exam each year, providing them with food and a house for an entire year as he trains them. He calls it Super 30. This leads to a clash between Anand and powerful players in the state’s coaching institute racket.

With all its problems, there is a certain poignance to the account of Anand’s early life as we witness the love within his family despite their financial struggles, the endearing flirtations between his father and mother, his father’s wisdom and mother’s joyousness, and the malice of those who claim to care about the downtrodden but in fact only care for their votes.

After Anand launches Super 30 though, the storytelling becomes as uneven as the film’s understanding of caste, getting downright lacklustre in large portions. The director seems to lose his grip on the narrative as it rolls along, and it does not help that Roshan’s performance is patchy at best. This is not even counting the fact that at 45, the actor is playing a character who is in his teens at the start of this film and in his 20s through most of the rest of it. This is also not counting the fact that Anand in the late 1990s is styled to look like a character out of a K.L. Saigal movie.

Few Bollywood stars can summon up pain in their eyes as Roshan can, but there is a tone and mannerism he used in his performance as a mentally challenged youth in Koi Mil Gaya (2003) that creeps into his dialogue delivery and occasionally even his facial expressions here in Super 30 too. It is a tone he has dipped into each time he has been called to portray simplicity in his career – in earlier roles it usually came up just in passing and was therefore tolerable, but it is hard to ignore in this film in which simplicity is the cornerstone of his character.

Hrithik Roshan is a gorgeous looking man but he has always needed a firm directorial hand to guide him. His Dad Rakesh Roshan, Khalid Mohamed (Fiza), Karan Johar (K3G), Ashutosh Gowariker (Jodhaa Akbar) and Zoya Akhtar (Luck By Chance, Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara) have brought out the very best in him. Vikas Bahl has not.

The supporting cast of Super 30 is better. Mrunal Thakur, who was excellent in Tabrez Noorani’s Love Sonia last year, is given little to do as Anand’s girlfriend here, but she pulls off that little well. The child actors are saddled with unmemorable characters that have no depth or expanse, but show flashes of how good they might be in better written roles. Aditya Srivastava is solid as Anand’s unscrupulous professional rival. Sadhana Singh and Virendra Saxena are absolute darlings as Anand’s parents. And Pankaj Tripathi as a corrupt politician manages to be both hilarious and menacing at the same time.

Once the script and direction of Super 30 begin to wander all over the place, there is no turning back. For a start, no one on the team seems to have stopped to ask how Anand intended to sustain Super 30 after exhausting his savings. The real Anand Kumar runs a parallel coaching centre from which he earns high fees that he then pumps into his classes for the poor, but there is no mention of it here nor of any other source of income, perhaps because that coaching centre has been a subject of some controversy. The director’s lax grip on the reins screams out most in the scene featuring the children singing the song Basanti No Dance that was clearly designed to be moving but is curiously emotionally cold.

Ajay-Atul’s music deserved a sturdier platform. As things stand, it is one of the best things about Super 30. Basanti No Dance and Question Mark have an attractive beat and rhythm. Jugraafiya, with its lyrics by the inimitable Amitabh Bhattacharya, is entertaining. And the end credits roll on a haunting melody titled Niyam Ho.

Super 30 comes across as a project that someone somewhere lost interest in at some point and then it all came apart. What else but casualness can explain the misspelling of the production house’s own name in the final credits?

Director Vikas Bahl’s Super 30 comes to theatres in the shadow of an allegation of sexual violence against him that emerged in October 2018 in the wake of the Me Too movement in Bollywood. Bahl’s decline as a filmmaker began long before Me Too though with the release of the boring as hell Shaandaar starring Alia Bhatt and Shahid Kapoor in 2015. It is hard to imagine that the man who made the fabulous Queen (2014) starring Kangana Ranaut also made Shaandaar. Frankly, with all its failings, Super 30 is a qualitative step up for him.

Bahl’s new film is not insufferable and soporific like Shaandaar, but it is misleading to mention it in the same breath as Anubhav Sinha’s Article 15, as I did in the first paragraph of this review, without a clarification. Article 15 is a deeply affecting study of a police officer whose caste privilege has given him the luxury of growing up ignorant about caste until it is rubbed in his face in his adulthood, at which point he sets out to educate himself through interactions with his colleagues and a Dalit activist. Caste should have been omnipresent in Super 30 but by the film’s second half has become almost an aside while the good folk battle conventional Bollywood villains. Someone somewhere gave up on Super 30 a while back, and it shows.

Rating (out of five stars): **

CBFC Rating (India):	U
Running time:	154 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/super-30-movie-review-hrithiks-uneven-acting-patchy-storytelling-and-a-narrow-take-on-caste-dilute-a-gutsy-theme-6976391.html

Visuals courtesy:

https://www.facebook.com/Super30Film/