REVIEW 84: MOD

Release date:	October 14, 2011
Director:	Nagesh Kukunoor
Cast:	Ayesha Takia Azmi, Rannvijay Singh Singha, Raghuvir Yadav, Tanve Azmi

Mod is the official Hindi remake of the Taiwanese film Keeping Watch. The rights have been paid for, and if you don’t find any mention of the original in Mod’s credits, it’s because the makers were not contractually obliged to do so – that’s what I was told when I checked with the producer.

Now that we’ve got that information out of the way, here’s the story: Aranya Mathur (Ayesha Takia Azmi) runs a watch repair shop in the sleepy hill town of Ganga. Her father (Raghuvir Yadav) is a Kishore Kumar fan whose band of musicians goes by the name Kishore Bhakts. Aranya’s mother left the family to pursue her dreams in the city many years back. The only mother figure in the young girl’s life is her aunt Gayatri (Tanve Azmi) who owns a small local restaurant. Hanging around in the shadows is Gangaram who is surreptitiously in love with Aranya. The picturesque town is going through a churn because a construction company is trying to buy up a number of private homes to build a large tourist resort. Into this scenario enters a shy young man called Andy Raymond (Rannvijay Singh Singha) who begins visiting Aranya every day with a watch (the same watch each day) that needs repair. He pays her each time with a Rs 100 note that he’s sculpted into a swan. Who is this man? What is his mysterious past? And what is his connection with Aranya’s childhood? I will leave you to discover the answers if you decide to watch this little film.

One of the nicest things about Mod is the choice of location – not a set piece but a genuinely slumberous small town where you can imagine real people going about their business just the way Aranya, Gayatri, Gangaram and their social circle do. Kukunoor hits the nail on the head with the locale and atmosphere. He also gets the casting of his leading lady right. Ayesha Takia Azmi is pretty, has a likeable screen presence and a natural style of acting. Tanve Azmi is perfect as every young girl’s dream aunt – liberal, fun, yet filled with wisdom. Except for Anant Mahadevan as Andy’s doctor, everyone looks believable here, including Rannvijay as the painfully reticent youngster who has harboured a crush on Aranya for a decade.

What does not work though is the chemistry between the lead pair and the progression of their relationship especially once she discovers the truth about Andy. Does Aranya fall for him because she genuinely likes him for who he is, or because of the lack of romantic options in tiny Ganga, or because she feels sorry for him, or merely because he pursues her relentlessly (he made me feel special in a way no one has before, she tells Gayatri)? I guess because I couldn’t feel that palpable pull between the two of them, I wasn’t convinced about the life-changing decision she takes in the end, apparently for his sake? Was that real love or sympathy … I’m not sure. It was also hard to believe that a girl from a small town where everyone knows everyone else would have forgotten her classmate from school so completely in just 10 years – neither Andy’s name nor his face ring a bell with her even for a moment when they first meet as adults. The music too leaves much to be desired.

Despite these reservations, I’d say there’s more I liked about this film than did not. The warmth between the aunt and niece, the kindly fashion in which the daughter tries to wean her father off the bottle, the attention to small characters such as Gangaram (love the shades of gray in this man) and the gentle manner in which Dissociative Identity Disorder is woven into the story without high drama are touches from the Nagesh Kukunoor we know who knows how to tell real stories about real people. It’s been over a decade since this man made Hyderabad Blues and walked his way into our hearts. That film was low on cash and produced with money collected from friends – the bare-bones budget was evident, but even the resultant tackiness was charming because it was clear that this director had a flair and a passion for storytelling. There have been ups and downs since then. Rockford, for instance, was an agreeable coming-of-age film set in a boarding school, Bollywood Calling was fun though flawed, Hyderabad Blues 2 was unimaginably bad, Iqbal was downright brilliant (one of the best Hindi films made about a person with a disability, shorn of melodrama and stereotypes, sensitive yet entertaining), and Aashayein with John Abraham seemed to be going well until it strayed into awkwardly philosophical territory.

And now there’s Mod. What this film needed was an aching chemistry between the hero and heroine, a desperate desire that would convince us that she would give up her life for him. In the absence of that, it still ends up as a small, sweet, simple, slow moving film that has left me with a pleasant feeling of positivity. 

Rating (out of five): **3/4

CBFC Rating:                       U without cuts

Running time:                        120 Minutes

Language:                              Hindi

Photograph courtesy: https://www.facebook.com/#!/MODthemovie

REVIEW 83: AZAAN

Release date:	October 14, 2011
Director:	Prashant Chadha
Cast:	Sachiin J. Joshi, Candice Boucher, Aarya Babbar, Dalip Tahil, Alyy Khan, Ravi Kissen, Vijayendra Ghatge, Sarita Choudhury

Azaan is the film I was really looking forward to this week. The trailers have been showing us some world-class action; and the theme is both international and relevant to our times.

But Azaan reminds me of a lesson I learnt years back – that the human body is an apt metaphor for films; even the most beautiful physique is nothing but a well-sculpted mass of flesh if the heart does not beat and the blood does not flow. And I’m afraid the heart just does not beat in this film.

This is the story of two little boys Azaan and Aman who choose different paths when they lose their loved ones to political violence. One grows up to become a terrorist, the other a secret agent trying to bust terror networks. India is the target of a vicious scheme of biological warfare being hatched by a foreign power, and Agent Azaan Khan seems to be the only one who can stop it.

The locations are real (the film’s official website tells me it was shot in eight countries – Germany, Morocco, France, India, Poland, Thailand, China, South Africa). And thankfully, for a change we have competent international actors playing foreigners here, unlike the embarrassingly bad extras we’re more used to seeing in Hindi films. In fact Azaan has most elements in its package in place: top-notch (and I suspect deliberately sparse) cinematography by Axel Fischer, production design by Priten R. Patil that transports us to the various countries Azaan visits not just with street shots but through every room and cave that you see him in, a grey-black colour scheme that I assume signifies the barrenness of Azaan’s emotional life, a sepia-toned flashback to Azaan’s memories of his childhood in a golden desert, a telling background score, at least two nice songs and some classy action.

Now if only as much time, money and energy had been spent on the screenplay and dialogues. And if only hero Sachiin J. Joshi, who plays Azaan, could act. The moment Joshi opens his mouth, you realise that his histrionics are restricted to that perfectly worked out torso. His expressionless face combined with ineffective dialogue writing ring this film’s death knell. Why, for instance, does he translate his Hindi lines into English when he first meets the beautiful Moroccan sand artist Afreen (Candice Boucher). “Yeh kahaani meri hai,” he says after a rather nicely done scene in which he watches her tell a tale of two brothers through the medium of her sandwork; he immediately follows that up with, “That story is mine,” and then adds, “Yeh kaise khatam hogi? How will it end?” No no, for the nth time, we Indians don’t talk like that!!!

This is particularly unfortunate because the film gets a couple of other things right on the dialogue front: many of the foreigners are shown speaking naturally in their own mother tongues, while subtitles in both English and Hindi appear on screen.

Of the rest of the cast, Alyy Khan as an Indian Intelligence official is suitably suave and intimidating, and Boucher is pretty but shares zero chemistry with Joshi. She has a lovely body, no doubt, but I wonder why the director chose to show her lying alone on a beach and gyrating about in the sand to signify that moment when she has sex with Azaan. Might have made more sense to show them getting some plain old-fashioned action between the sheets, don’t you think?

Perhaps that scene typifies what is wrong with Azaan – the production values are slick, everything and everyone looks pretty and/or neat and well-shot and well-made-up and stylised, it’s evident that big money has been invested in the packaging, but it lacks heart and soul and a spark.

In Steven Soderbergh’s recent film Contagion, when US scientists finally find a cure for a mysterious viral infection that is killing millions across the world, I found myself actually heaving a sigh of relief because the director managed to draw us so effectively into the painful and time-consuming battle that was being fought by the film’s various characters. But when India manages to find a cure for the virulent epidemic that strikes in Azaan, I felt nothing.

Rating (out of five): **

CBFC Rating:                       U/A without visual cuts (the Censor Board asked for the word “China” to be muted)

Running time:                        140 Minutes

Language:                              Hindi and various other languages

Photograph courtesy: http://www.aazaan.com/     

REVIEW 82: SOUNDTRACK

Release date:	October 7, 2011
Director:	Neerav Ghosh
Cast:	Rajeev Khandelwal, Soha Ali Khan, Mohan Kapur

Before anything else, may I just say how grateful I am to the producers of Soundtrack for not embarrassing us as a nation like Bollywood so often does and for doing what their colleagues in the industry rarely do … buying the rights to remake a film instead of slyly copying and claiming originality. Soundtrack is based on It’s All Gone Pete Tong, an English film about a talented and whacked-out deejay who turns deaf.

Rajeev Khandelwal plays DJ Raunak Kaul who allows his life to be taken over by drugs, alcoholism, cigarettes and other body-destroying vices. But his music is brilliant, he becomes an instant rage among Mumbai’s nightclubbers and so no one really cares that he’s ruining his life until he starts losing his hearing. Raunak’s friends and colleagues realise there’s something wrong only when his creativity takes a beating. When a man can’t hear, how can he make music and assess its quality? I won’t give away the techniques Raunak devices to overcome this life-changing hurdle … all I’ll say is that it’s such a wonderful change to see a Hindi film about a person with a disability that does not over-dramatise or romanticise the tragedy but handles it with empathy and good humour. It’s not quite in the league of Nagesh Kukunoor’s beautiful film Iqbal, but it’s very nice all the same – there’s little rona-dhona here, just life.

Khandelwal is lovely in Soundtrack. After his commendable performance as an insatiably aggressive policeman in Bejoy Nambiar’s Shaitan earlier this year, here’s another job well done. Not a single scene is over-acted, not a shot over-done. But it’s not his acting alone that is impactful here. The film’s casting directors should be lauded for picking an actor who doesn’t fit the stereotype in some people’s minds of what a drugged-out deejay would look like … this guy is neat, handsome, clean, clean-shaven and ever so … nice!

More good casting and good acting … Soha Ali Khan is wonderful as Gauri, the woman who helps Raunak lift himself out of the abyss of depression that he plunges into when he loses his hearing. I’ve often found Mohan Kapur too over-the-top for my taste, but he’s just right as Charlie the loud music producer who gives Raunak his first break. In the middle of so much sensitivity, it hurt to hear Charlie introduce Raunak to a concert audience as “the man who makes handicapped people look cool”, but I could imagine a real-life character like Charlie speaking precisely those words … full marks to the dialogue writers. The music of this film is as unusual for Bollywood as is this storyline. I particularly like Raunak’s signature tune Jhoom fakira that makes him a star and the use of oldies Ruk jaana nahin, Yeh jeevan hai and Khullam khullam pyaar karenge hum dono to demonstrate the man’s changing attitude towards life.

There’s so much to praise in Soundtrack that I find myself putting off the part of this review where I tell you what’s wrong with it. Ah well, a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do …

Soundtrack adopts a narrative style wherein the story is interspersed with comments by Bollywood personalities such as Kailash Kher, Anu Malik, Anurag Kashyap and others giving us their views on Raunak Kaul. Not only did the device become tedious beyond a point, it was also slightly irritating because of the effort to lend a false sense of authenticity to the story though we know that Raunak does not exist and therefore, none of these real people could be speaking the truth! There are also repeated references to Raunak’s animosity towards his late father … though we are never quite given to understand the reasons for his feelings. And I suspect that Soundtrack would have been far more hard-hitting than it ends up being if it had taken less time to arrive at the point where Raunak realises that he’s losing his hearing.

But despite all these flaws, Soundtrack is a sweet, small, moving, funny, interesting film. It’s hard to believe that director Neerav Ghosh is a debutant. I love the fact that he does not use graphics in psychedelic colours and shaky camerawork to signify Raunak’s hedonistic lifestyle in the first half of the film. In fact, cinematographer Anshuman Mahaley’s shot compositions are quite unusual – there’s a scene I found particularly interesting featuring Raunak and Charlie seated on bar stools one lazy afternoon. Charlie’s white dressing gown is open from the front, and he sits carelessly with his legs wide apart giving us a clear outline of his groin clothed in technicoloured briefs.

So I’d recommend Soundtrack to you for Rajeev Khandelwal’s excellent acting, his warm chemistry with Ms Khan, the things I learnt while watching Raunak discover ways of overcoming his deafness to become a top-notch musician once again, the beauty of watching him notice sounds all around him though he can no longer hear, its positivity and uplifting tone, and for this message that is one among many quotes from legendary musician Ludwig van Beethoven that appear on screen throughout the film: “The best way to not think of your own malady is to keep occupied.” I guess you know that Beethoven continued to compose music even after he turned deaf. If you didn’t, well now you do.

Rating (out of five): ***

CBFC Rating:                       A without cuts

Running time:                        142 Minutes

Language:                              Hindi

Photograph courtesy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundtrack_(film)

REVIEW 81: RASCALS

Release date:	October 6, 2011
Director:	David Dhawan
Cast:	Ajay Devgn, Sanjay Dutt, Kangna Ranaut, Arjun Rampal

I must jog my memory before I write this review … what film was it I just saw? Was it Double Dhamaal, Rascals, No Problem or … err …? Was it directed by Indra Kumar, Anees Bazmee, David Dhawan or … err …? Hmm … tough one!

Yes it’s finally happened. We’ve reached that stage in Bollywood’s slapstick comedy journey when one film has begun merging with the next and then the next, when comic devices are being repeated endlessly, and when it’s becoming difficult to distinguish one from the other. Rascals is the story of two rival con men who fall for the same woman. It’s okay for a few laughs here and there, but the truth is that I thought most of the gags fell flat!

The reason is simple. If in Anees Bazmee’s 2010 release No Problem, Sanjay Dutt and Akshaye Khanna played crooks called Yash and Raj which led to jokes referencing Yashraj Films, here in Rascals Dutt and Ajay Devgn are called Chetan Chouhan and Bhagat Bhosle which of course leads to repeated mentions of (yes people, you got it right!) Chetan Bhagat of course. If in all David Dhawan’s recent comedies and in Bazmee’s blockbuster Ready this year, rhyming words and unimaginative puns were meant to signify humour, there’s more of the same in Rascals.

The positives are that Devgn is growing as a comedian with each passing film; Ranaut too shows some potential in that department here (in a scene featuring a Ma Firangini – check it out); and Vishal Shekhar’s music is catchy for the most part. The negatives are that it’s sad to see Ranaut allowing a role (and Vikas Sivaraman’s camera) to be so focused on her bosom, considering that she seemed like such an interesting actress when she started out in Bollywood; it’s just as sad to see an actor of Devgn’s calibre devote so much time to films like Rascals when he’s capable of delivering a more refined comedy like Atithi Tum Kab Jaoge; and it’s almost tragic to see one of Bollywood’s original muscle men reduced to being a cinematographer’s biggest challenge as Rascals’ camera tries but fails to camouflage Dutt’s expanding girth which gets highlighted further by the fact that he’s standing alongside a slim, trim and fit Devgn and Ranaut in teeny clothes.

Please, let me make it amply clear that I’m not against mindlessness. We all want to occasionally let our hair down and laugh without exercising our brains too much. Dhawan was once a master of that game and I guffawed my guts out watching Govinda and Karisma Kapoor’s shenanigans in Hero No. 1 and Salman Khan and Sushmita Sen’s antics in Biwi No. 1. But it feels bad to see a director take his audience so much for granted, especially when he still has it in him to deliver the goods. Dhawan has churned out a lot of poor quality fare since the good old 1990s, but somewhere in between all those duds, I enjoyed the craziness of Salman, Akshay Kumar and Priyanka Chopra’s tomfoolery in Mujhse Shaadi Karogi and the Salman-Sush combo in Maine Pyaar Kyun Kiya. Even Rascals features one scene that cracked me up – it involves a yogic pose quite inventively named Nagnamukhasan by Chetan Chouhan. That single scene may make you laugh till you cry. But when Antony Gonsalves (a third villain in this film played by hottie Arjun Rampal) mouthed a dialogue that suggests the possibility of a sequel to Rascals, I simply wanted to cry!

CBFC Rating:                       U/A

Running time:                        125 Minutes

Language:                              Hindi

Photograph courtesy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rascals_(film)   

Rating (out of five): *1/2

REVIEW 80: HUM TUM SHABANA

Release date:	September 30, 2011
Director:	Sagar Ballary
Cast:	Shreyas Talpade, Tusshar Kapoor, Minissha Lamba, Pia Trivedi, Satish Kaushik, Sanjay Mishra

When I made a promise on this blog at the start of the year that I would not miss a single Hindi film released in the National Capital Region in 2011, I don’t think I realised what I was setting myself up for. But to quote Salman Khan’s refrain from the film Wanted and then take it further “with a little help from my friends”: “Ek baar jo maine commitment ki, to apne aap ki bhi nahin sunti. Doosri baar commitment ki to apne baap ki bhi nahin sunti. Aur teesri baar commitment ki toh RAJINIKANTH ki bhi nahi sunti.” (Line 2 – courtesy a Delhi radio jockey who I heard in passing, Line 3 – courtesy @trishul3 a.k.a. Trishul R.S. from Twitter).  

So – since I skipped the press preview of Hum Tum Shabana (HTS) because I was tied up, and since I didn’t get the time to watch it on Friday and Saturday either – here I am on Sunday, typing up a gale of words on my computer after having watched the film earlier in the day. To borrow a line from another film that I won’t denigrate by naming it in the same breath as Hum Tum Shabana: jo vaada kiya, woh nibhana padega! Sigh!

Hum Tum Shabana is the story of two rivals in love. Karthik Iyer (Shreyas Talpade) and Rishi Malhotra (Tusshar Kapoor) work for an event management company that’s organising a beauty pageant in which Shabana Raza (Minissha Lamba) is a contestant. Their competition for her affections takes them all the way from the catwalk in Goa to her gangster uncle’s home in Mumbai. The uncle in question is a vile, violent fellow who has a penchant for slapping himself when he’s angry and smacking others to show affection. To win Shabana – torn as she is between Karthik and Rishi – the boys are ordered to train in an academy for the underworld (ha ha ha!) and pass an exam. There you go, that’s the précis of the story.

Director Sagar Ballary is the man who brought us the sleeper indie hit Bheja Fry in 2007 that became Vinay Pathak’s calling card in the profession. His Bheja Fry 2 earlier this year was dismissed by most critics and viewers, but I’ll confess I thought even that was good timepass. To say I didn’t laugh AT ALL during Hum Tum Shabana would be a lie … I did laugh … Precisely 10 times … Yes, I counted with tally bars! … That’s how bored I was! Whatever happened to your easy sense of humour, Mr Ballary?

HTS’s witless script and unoriginal dialogues are not its only problems. The film is unintentionally funny when its casting choices present Minissha Lamba to us as a credible Indian beauty pageant contestant. Please don’t get me wrong – I don’t believe in making personal remarks. But just as I’d be unconvinced if any Indian film served up a serving defence services officer with dreadlocks and earrings, so too I’m unconvinced when I’m shown little Minissha on a ramp in the midst of tall, willowy, svelte women who end up making her regular-girl-type, petite figure seem stocky in comparison.

HTS’s bankruptcy of ideas is evident from the fact that Karthik contaminates Rishi’s mouthwash in the film, causing him to lose his voice, thus giving Tusshar Kapoor the opportunity for a few minutes to reprise his speech-impaired character in the superhit Golmaal film series. Worse, the moment I heard the film’s signature song Ke music band na karo on the radio a few weeks back, it gave me a sense of déjà vu. The musical style and the tone of the lyrics felt too much like a hangover of Chaar baj gaye lekin party abhi baaki hai from the film Faltu earlier this year. HTS offers us a second song that just rejigs the subsequent lines of Char baj gaye that go “Hey Mr DJ, mera gaana please play. Aaj no wine, aaj no lager, aaj piyenge champagne.” In HTS that becomes: “Thank you Mr DJ, thank you for this song. Thank you to the baby (or at least that’s what it sounded like to me) for dancing all night long.” Now that I’ve done my research for this review, whaddyaknow, I discover that Sachin-Jigar of Faltu are the music directors of HTS too!

Not surprisingly, those 10 laughs that I did have in the film were elicited by situations involving Shreyas Talpade, Sanjay Mishra and Satish Kaushik, all three of them natural comics who deserve better than this film and have certainly done better in the past. The only member of the cast who comes off looking good is model Pia Trivedi in the role of Shabana’s bitchy fellow contestant. Either she’s playing herself completely, or she’s got a genuine spark and I’d like to see more of her in the future.

Before I wrap up, my profuse apologies to the amorous couple who clearly became self-conscious as soon as I took my seat in the last row of which they’d been the only other occupants until then in a near-empty hall. I didn’t have the presence of mind to switch rows. The result … I spent Rs 225 and two hours-plus on this film and didn’t get my paisa vasool. Because of me, they didn’t either. I’m truly sorry!

Rating (out of five): *

CBFC Rating:                       U/A without visual cuts, but with several words muted

Running time:                        125 Minutes

Language:                              Hindi

Photograph courtesy: https://www.facebook.com/#!/Hum.Tum.Shabana  

REVIEW 79: TERE MERE PHERE

Release date:	September 30, 2011
Director:	Deepa Sahi
Cast:	Jagrat Desai, Sasha Goradia, Vinay Pathak, Riya Sen, Sushmita Mukherjee, Darshan Jariwala

They’re completely in love. But when he makes coffee for her, he leaves a mess behind. When she sees the mess she screams at him. After a bath, he dumps his wet towel on a chair. She spots the offending cloth and screams a little more. Before you know it they’re barely on talking terms.

It’s a familiar story of a loving relationship gone awry, that is always interesting in the re-telling. But Tere Mere Phere fails to make sense because the fraying of the lead couple’s ties happens not over several years of marriage but during the first few days of their honeymoon! And you know what, the heroine’s high-pitched nagging is such a challenge to the ears that when the husband asks her, “Tum itna chillaati kyun ho?” I wanted to add my voice to his complaint.

Actress Deepa Sahi makes her directorial debut with a film filled with potential that it fails to live up to. Pooja (Sasha Goradia) and Rahul (Jagrat Desai) are a squabbling couple on their honeymoon, riding their trailer truck through scenic Himachal Pradesh. Along the way they pick up Jai (Vinay Pathak) who hitches a ride with them at gunpoint since he’s desperate to reach his lady love before she’s forcibly married off to someone else by her family. As Rahul and Pooja incessantly yell and throw barbs at each other much to Jai’s exasperation, we’re told their love story in flashback.

From the very first scene it’s clear that this film is meant to be a farce. Everyone is deliberately over-acting, especially the lead pair and the boy’s mother played by the delightful Sushmita Mukherjee who deserves a lot better than the film industry ever offered her. The early scenes of the family’s shenanigans at a wedding – so typical of the behaviour of guests at large Indian shaadis – are genuine rib-ticklers. But pretty soon, the joke is on us as the film degenerates into unbearable loudness and a ceaseless series of relationship improbabilities. Sample this: Rahul is a nice guy in love with his bride, but when they pick up a hitchhiking couple, he is immediately ensnared by the charms of the lady who openly flirts with him in Pooja’s presence. During a phase when couples are usually trying to cover up their flaws and present their best side to each other, these two seem determined to do the opposite.

I’m not sure why Sahi felt the need to crunch the complete degeneration of a relationship into such a short time span. If she hadn’t, she might have had an interesting film to offer us. Desai and Goradia may actually be good in a better film, but in Tere Mere Phere their exaggerated sparring becomes terribly unfunny and insufferable beyond a point. Vinay Pathak has nothing new or remarkable to offer us in this film. And after pitching in a surprisingly good and understated performance in Rituparno Ghosh’s Bengali film Noukadubi earlier this year, Riya Sen as his supposedly rustic girlfriend is nothing more than a pretty presence with an inexplicably westernized accent in the film.

The one major plus point of Tere Mere Phere is the way it explores spectacular Himachal Pradesh in ways that Hindi films have not done before. A thumbs up to the cinematographer for doing justice to the state’s beauty. A thumbs down to the film though!

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Rating (out of five): *1/2

CBFC Rating:                       U/A without cuts

Running time:                        124 Minutes

Language:                              Hindi

Photograph courtesy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tere_Mere_Phere

REVIEW 78: FORCE

Release date:	September 30, 2011
Director:	Nishikant Kamat
Cast:	John Abraham, Genelia D’souza, Vidyut Jamwal, Mohnish Bahl, Sandhya Mridul, Raj Babbar

I was apprehensive as I entered the theatre to watch Force. After all it’s a remake of Gautham Menon’s engrossing 2003 Tamil blockbuster Kaakha Kaakha which starred Surya Sivakumar – who is an adjective unto himself – and the vivacious Jyothika. Could Nishikant Kamat, John Abraham and Genelia D’souza possibly match up?

Before we answer that question, a quick look at the story for those who’ve not seen the original film. Mumbai policeman Yashvardhan (Abraham) believes that his dedication to his work comes from his family-less life: no commitments and no relationships mean he has nothing to fear. Things change when he ends up falling for Maya (D’souza) in spite of himself. Meanwhile, on a parallel track, a specialised task force headed by Yash invites the wrath of drug lord Vishnu whose brother they’d killed. Force takes us through Vishnu’s quest for revenge against the quartet while their personal lives play out in the background.

To answer the question on the minds of all Tamil film buffs: yes, Force is a very faithful re-telling of Kaakha Kaakha. In fact, one major irritant for me came in the form of the writing credits which read “Story by Ritesh Shah, inspired by the Tamil film Kaakha Kaakha”.  Oh c’mon, so if I translate Romeo & Juliet into Hindi, would I say “Story by Anna M.M. Vetticad, inspired by William Shakespeare’s English play”?!

I guess it counts as progress that a Hindi film industry more used to blatant lifts is now increasingly being constrained to at least acknowledge its sources, because of greater public awareness and media pressure. With that in mind let’s return to our review. Nishikant Kamat and his action director Allan Amin need to be lauded for the high drama that is Force’s forte. The chases and fights are so well-choreographed that I found myself holding my breath through each one of them. Add to that Harris Jayaraj’s heart-stopping background score, beautiful locations, the ever-reliable Ayananka Bose’s cinematography and Aarif Shaikh’s razor-sharp editing, and what we get is a slick and absorbing cops-and-robbers saga with positives that overshadow its flaws.

Of the able supporting cast, a special mention must go to an interesting new actor called Vidyut Jamwal who plays Vishnu, Mohnish Bahl as Yash’s colleague and Sandhya Mridul as his feisty wife (“go lose your virginity”, she tells Yash on his wedding day). In fact, the camaraderie between the policemen, their wives and girlfriends is quite touchingly potrayed.

The film’s weakest link is the casting of its heroine. Genelia D’souza is a sweet looking girl, but has her limitations as an actress. She also does not have the screen presence to match John Abraham’s charisma which at least in this film required a leading lady who could match the man Centigrade for Centigrade. Abraham himself is no Surya in the acting department, but he is oven hot and there is an inherent sincerity in his personality that’s hard to resist. Interestingly, at 38, his face shows his age but unlike several of his industry colleagues, he looks remarkably and refreshingly un-Botoxed and un-cosmetic-surgeoned – a real man despite that unbelievably unreal hot bod. Besides, Kamat is wise enough to play on Abraham’s strengths – the charming smile, the warmth, the intensity – and ends up extracting a career best performance from the star.

But where he fails is in summoning up any chemistry between the lead pair. The loveliness of Kaakha Kaakha was in the romance between Surya’s Anbuchelvan and his beloved. When the villain tries to hurt her, Anbuchelvan’s pain was our pain. Jyothika played Maya as a bubbly free spirit, but she avoided crossing the line from cute to cutesy. Abraham and D’souza, however, come across as a torrid-looking dude and a doll, a man and a girl, not an adult couple hopelessly in love. It’s all very sweet to begin with. When Yash spots Maya one night through his rain-spattered windshield, he turns on the wiper to get a clearer view. And D’souza is actually quite appealing in the scene when Maya first tells the reticent Yash that she loves him and later when she’s sexually forward with him. “I want to make love to you,” she tells him, a line Bollywood heroines rarely utter, and when he hesitates to kiss her, she hastily clarifies, “Main under-age nahin hoon!” But post interval, every time Maya appears on screen, the film dips.

Perhaps that’s why Kamat has pared down the romance considerably, throwing it in occasionally between powerful action sequences. Force does not have the emotional resonance of Kaakha Kaakha or this director’s own Mumbai Meri Jaan. But boy oh boy, the action is a killer!!! A beefy policeman lifts a motorbike with his bare hands and flings it on a thug. A lone cop chases an unknown villain unrelentingly one night over cars and bridges, railway tracks and trains, and it feels like they’ll just never stop! A gangster rips the bandage off a policeman’s bullet wound and grinds his wrist into it! A policeman impales a bad guy on a meat hook!  

So then this is a high-adrenaline, action flick that deals with the dilemmas of honest policemen. Interestingly, Yash does believe in letting his fists or bullets do the talking in cases where he knows the law will be silent, but Force is not a justification of police atrocities. Vishnu even tells Yash that he’d never have sought revenge if Yash had allowed the law to take its own course. Equally interestingly, the killing that sparks off Vishnu’s marauding mood is actually an act of self defence. The film has its flaws no doubt … but attention all adrenaline junkies, Force is in town!

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Rating (out of five): ***1/2

CBFC Rating:                       U/A without cuts

Running time:                        130 Minutes

Language:                              Hindi

Photograph courtesy: http://www.forcethemovie.com/