REVIEW 345: WELCOME BACK

Release date:	September 4, 2015
Director:	Anees Bazmee
Cast: Language:	Anil Kapoor, Nana Patekar, Shruti Haasan, Paresh Rawal, Dimple Kapadia, Ankita Shrivastava, John Abraham, Naseeruddin Shah, Shiney Ahuja Hindi

There is just one way to make an entertaining slapstick comedy: with these two ingredients: unabashedness in your commitment to mindlessness and actors with great timing.

Welcome Back – directed and co-written by Anees Bazmee – is silly and it knows it. And it ain’t apologising for it. It also stars some great comedians.

Thank goodness on both fronts, because the film is a hoot.

Welcome Back is a sequel to 2007’s Welcome by the same director. Truth be told, it’s a shameless reworking of the exact same template that succeeded eight years back. It could have ended up feeling like a desperate cliché but is not, because the recycling bears a self-mocking tone, the dialogues are hilarious, the leads – Anil Kapoor and Nana Patekar – are in full form and the cast has been intelligently used (except for Dimple Kapadia who is wasted).

Welcome was about gangsters Uday Shetty (Nana) and Majnu (Anil) who are close friends. Both are anxious to get hitched but insist on getting Uday’s younger sister Sanjana (Katrina Kaif) married first. They fix her up with Rajiv (Akshay Kumar), the nephew of Dr Ghungroo (Paresh Rawal). Sanjana and Rajiv fall in love, unaware of their families’ plans. Also in the picture: a super-glam young woman called Ishika pretending to be in love with both Uday and Majnu, who in turn are genuinely smitten by her. Enter: the dangerous don RDX and his son Lucky.

Cut to 2015. A now reformed Uday Bhai and Majnu Bhai are trying to be respectable hoteliers in Dubai. They are still desperate to get married. Sanjana is gone but this time their marriage plans are thwarted by the discovery of another sister called Ranjana (Shruti Haasan). Unknown to them, Ranjana falls in love with Ajay/Ajju Bhai (John Abraham) who is the man they intended for her in the first place. Also in the picture: a super-glam young woman (Ankita Shrivastava) who Uday and Majnu both fall in love with; she in turn pretends to be in love with both of them. Enter: the dangerous don Wanted Bhai (Naseeruddin Shah) and his son Honey (Shiney Ahuja).

As I said, it’s the EXACT SAME TEMPLATE!!!

And though that is what makes it unmemorable, it is great fun while it lasts!

The reason, I guess, is that Anees Bazmee is wise enough to know exactly why the first film was a hit – Welcome was promoted as an Akshay film with Katrina as his romantic interest but it was, in truth, an Anil-Nana enterprise and they were to-die-for in the film. We knew already that Anil is excellent with comedy, but this was a side of Nana that Hindi audiences had not seen. Akshay and Kat were given the least to do while the spotlight remained fixed firmly on the veterans.

That’s what we get in Welcome Back too: Anil-Nana as the focal point, not John (contrary to what the poster suggests) or Shruti. It’s only fair to say though that John is evolving in comedy – in Welcome Back and 2011’s Desi Boyz, he is miles ahead of his performance in 2005’s Garam Masala. It is also important to point out that in the universe of this franchise where women are lesser beings, newcomer Ankita was probably cast primarily for how good she looks in a bikini but she reveals a comedic gene in the limited space she gets.

Admittedly a couple of the songs in the film are unnecessary, and all the songs have ordinary tunes. Some compensation for the ordinariness comes in the form of those nuttily garish costumes and Nana’s lack of inhibitions about his really bad dancing. The special effects in the over-stretched climax are sub-par, but by then Welcome Back had cracked me up so relentlessly, that I did not care. The thing that killed me throughout the film though was Anil’s body.

Hehe, it’s not what you are thinking (though he does have an enviable waistline). What I mean is that some actors cannot even sustain an accent through the duration of a film; Anil, on the other hand, does not let up even for a second on his ridiculously sloping shoulders and gait.

The nicest thing about Welcome Back is that it is, for the most part, inoffensive. Lazy humour writers take potshots at groups in a socially weak position. Sexist jokes about women, gay jokes, jokes about persons with disabilities and (in India) jokes about dark skin are so easy to do. We all have our own Lakshman rekhas – I’m not looking for Yes Minister-level quality in a slapstick comedy, but even within the slapstick arena, for me the line is drawn at rape jokes (which I find repugnant) and the nauseatingly caricatured homosexual man of numerous Hindi films. Welcome Back features neither of the above. It does needlessly resort to one wisecrack about dark skin, but that gag is so fleeting and the rest are so innocuous, that the film marks a refreshing change from the misogynistic and homophobic clichés Bollywood comedy often delivers.

Welcome Back is a brazen ode to stupidity and though it’s forgettable, I had a good time while I watched it. I’m not sure what I liked most: the ludicrous dialogues, Nana’s terrible dancing, Paresh stealing scenes in a brief role (sadly, Naseer is just so-so) or Rajpal Yadav spoofing PK. This I can say for sure: watching Anil Kapoor in full flow is worth the price of booking an entire theatre, especially for that crazy scene in which his Majnu Bhai plays antakshari in a cemetery.

If you must do slapstick, then THIS is how it’s done.

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

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

Poster courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welcome_Back_(film)

REVIEW 344: PHANTOM

Release date:	August 28, 2015
Director:	Kabir Khan
Cast: Language:	Saif Ali Khan, Katrina Kaif, Zeeshan Ayyub, Sohaila Kapur Hindi

It is not profound. It is far from being a work of genius. And the screenplay is not of the kick-ass variety you would expect from a fictionalised Indian fantasy about a plot to kill the masterminds of the 26/11 terror attacks in Mumbai (based on S. Hussain Zaidi’s book Mumbai Avengers).

Still, Phantom is fun when it’s being a matter-of-fact thriller instead of a mushy patriotic drama. As it happens, it is not mushy for the most part, the action is slick and twists come flying thick and fast, leaving us with little time while the film is on to reason out whether they are credible.

Saif Ali Khan holds it all together, playing Daniyal Khan, a disgraced ex-Armyman who is recruited by India’s Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) for a mission – not authorised by the government – to eliminate the 26/11 kingpins. RAW’s chief is persuaded to take up the project by an over-zealous new joinee (Zeeshan Ayyub). Daniyal is a phantom of sorts since he virtually disappeared after his exit from the forces, making him ideal for the project: he is keen to regain his honour, but if he dies while on duty no one would know and even less people would care. 

And so he agrees to avenge 26/11, travelling from the UK to the US, Syria and Pakistan in the bargain. Help comes in the form of ex-RAW hand and current international security consultant, Nawaz Mistry (Katrina Kaif), sundry RAW plants and an unexpected Pakistani ally.

Saif in Phantom has put behind him Agent Vinod (2012) in which he looked like an amateur playing Cops ‘n’ Robbers with toy guns. He is believable as a secret agent in this one. His demeanour here harks back to his performance in 2004 in a far superior film, Ek Hasina Thi.

The supporting cast is a mixed bag, the highlight being Sohaila Kapur as an old Pakistani nurse. The jingoistic elements in Phantom revolve around the RAW officer played by Zeeshan Ayyub who is served poorly by the writing. His character gets almost all the film’s predictable, chest-thumpingly patriotic dialogues and scenes – a pity because this talented actor deserves better. 

I couldn’t help but wonder what Priyanka Chopra or Anushka Sharma might have done with the better-written role of Nawaz Mistry, but since it is Katrina that we’ve got, it must be said that her limitations as an actress are somewhat neutralised in Phantom by director Kabir Khan’s ability to tap into a certain comfort level she has developed with the camera over the years. He does it here while also not allowing the camera to obsess over her pretty face as it does in most of her films.

As for her character, it’s interesting to see a Hindi film giving us an uncaricatured Parsi. It’s interesting too to see an Indian Muslim hero in a story in which no one delivers a sermon on secularism in the context of his faith, as is the norm with Hindi films featuring significant Muslim characters. Clearly a point is being made with Daniyal being a Khan, but the messaging is unspoken, which is nice. Of course it would be nicer still for us to get more films where a character’s Muslim-/Sikh-/Christian-/Parsi-ness is not an element in the plot. Muslims, Parsis and all minorities are people, you know. They exist, and a screenplay should not feel compelled to justify their presence in a story. That’s why Nawaz in Phantom is a small milestone.

It’s odd that Haafiz Saeed’s name is disguised as Haariz Saeed in the film, since David Coleman Headley is called David Coleman Headley. That’s not the only question mark. Since the RAW chief was authorising the operation despite a vehement no from the Home Minister, it’s unclear how he could guarantee to Daniyal that he would be reinstated in the Army and his honour restored, if the job was completed successfully. Was he lying? It didn’t seem so. Is the implication then that the Union Cabinet would fall in line once the mission was aced? Well then, Pakistani commentators have routinely suggested that RAW is as much of a mischief-maker as the ISI across the border which our people say has a stranglehold over the Pakistan government, so it’s laughable that an Indian film implying as much has been banned there.  

For those concerned about Phantom cashing in on public bloodlust, the film carefully positions its mission as one designed to save India and Pakistan from going to war. The script is at pains to point out that while Indians suffer because of Pakistani terrorists, thousands of Pakistanis too die as a result of home-grown terror. Underlining the point is one of Daniyal’s co-conspirators: a Pakistani who experienced a great personal loss at the hands of the terrorists Daniyal is targeting.

Where jingoism does rear its head in the film, it is brief and too bland, even silly to be worrisome in the way the ending of Nikhil Advani’s D-Day was. In fact, these portions pull Phantom down with cliched, flag-waving dialogues and a painfully long-drawn-out, emotionally manipulative climax. Sans this, it could have been a neat, audacious action thriller despite its lack of depth.

Audacity can lead to realities stranger than fiction. If before 9/11, Hollywood had made a film about men flying planes into New York’s World Trade Centre, would we have believed it? Pre-26/11, if an Indian director had made a film about foreigners casually entering Mumbai by sea through unguarded beaches, gunning down ordinary citizens at sundry locations in the city and laying siege to a 5-star hotel for days, would we not have laughed it off? Viewed in that context, Phantom is not really as improbable as it seems when we analyse it at an intellectual level.

Sure it lacks depth and is, therefore, not particularly memorable, a far cry from Kabir’s recent Bajrangi Bhaijaan. Phantom is what we Indians call “timepass”. Considering the subject matter, it should have been more, but as it is, it’s what we Indians additionally call a “one-time watch”.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	U/A
Running time:	147 minutes

Poster courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_(2015_film)