Gabbar Is Back: Review

Hindi movie villains have said some pretty weird things over the years. Still, I don’t think I’ve ever heard a catchphrase as un-catchy as the one Digvijay Patil (Suman Talwar) wields in Gabbar Is Back. “I am a brand,” he yells time and again. With a statement of villainy this underwhelming, you’d expect our hero to top it easily. Not so. “I am a bigger brand than you,” Akshay Kumar yells back. They start fighting after this exchange, though they could just as easily have compared stock prices.

Gabbar’s back. Sort of, anyway. Kumar plays a vigilante hero operating under this epochal alias. He has a beard. He utters a couple of Amjad Khan’s lines from Sholay. And that’s it, really. Kumar and his director, Krish (Radhakrishna Jagarlamudi), are utilizing Hindi cinema’s best-known villain as a crutch, using his outsize personality to obscure the fact that they have little of their own. Apart from being pathetic, theft of this sort is also self-defeating. Every time the film references Gabbar, it only serves to remind the audience of what they’re missing.

The number of Bollywood films expressing disgust with the state of the nation and proposing vigilante solutions has increased markedly in recent years. A key film was Neeraj Pandey’s A Wednesday! (2008), which traded in fears of another terrorist bombing; its combination of self-justified anger and quick-fix solutions has been borrowed by films less skilfully manipulative. Gabbar’s methods are similar to those adopted by Randeep Hooda’s gang in Ungli (2014): Identify wrongdoers, kidnap and try them. But in an upping of the ante that is disturbing even in a film this ridiculous, Gabbar goes ahead and kills the most corrupt ones. However, unlike NH10 or Badlapur, which dealt head-on with the messiness of taking the law into one’s own hands, Gabbar Is Back is cartoon activism at best.

No one watches an Akshay Kumar film for the writing, but Gabbar Is Back (story by A.R. Murugadoss, additional screenplay and dialogues by Rajat Arora) is in a class by itself. “Our system is like an infant’s diaper,” Gabbar deadpans to the camera (Kumar delivers nearly half his lines this way). “Get me information on all the Adityas in the country,” Talwar’s baddie demands unreasonably. “Who is Gabbar?” a police inspector asks, staring at a chart with a blank face and a “?” sign on it. “Question mark.”

Who green-lights rubbish like this? Question mark.

This review appeared in Mint.

Jai Ho! Democracy: Review

Ranjit Kapoor was responsible for much of the eminently quotable dialogue in Kundan Shah’s Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro (1983). He also wrote the dialogue for Shekhar Kapur’s Bandit Queen (1994), introducing a tougher, earthier screenwriting idiom that took about a decade to catch on. His directorial debut, Chintu Ji (2009), had a song whose chorus was simply "Akira Kurosawa, Vittorio De Sica", repeated four times. These are all signal achievements. Jai Ho! Democracy is a signal failure.

The film, co-directed by Kapoor and Bikramjeet Singh Bhullar, has a mildly promising first half-hour. A chicken has wandered into no man’s land on the India-Pakistan border and soldiers on both sides are convinced that it belongs to their country. The Indian contingent sends a man to retrieve it, but he’s fired upon by the enemy and forced to take cover. News of the incident reaches New Delhi, where a special parliamentary committee is appointed to look into the matter. The rest of the film concerns itself with the infantile bickering in the committee and the skirmishes on the border.

Kapoor has come up with silly gags in the past—the telephone scene from Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro is funny precisely because it’s so ridiculous—but they had bite, an element that’s sorely missing here. Jai Ho! Democracy aims at everything in sight, from overzealous TV anchors to porn-watching MPs, and misses every time. The weak writing and stagy direction (a possible by-product of Kapoor’s work as a theatre director) is further compounded by the miscasting and misuse of the actors who make up the parliamentary committe: Seema Biswas, Om Puri, Adil Hussain, Satish Kaushik, Grusha Kapoor and Aamir Bashir. Only Annu Kapoor, in full Mehmood-in-Padosan mode as chairperson of the committee, manages a couple of laughs.

There’s a desperation to most of the film’s scenes, as if the writers were being forced to come up with material on the spot. I’m not sure why Om Puri agreed to act in a film in which his character is forced to do 17 squats by way of apology, but he did, and it’s brutal. But the film really begins to lose its marbles when a Pakistani army cook risks his life to bring food and water to the Indian fowl-fetcher in no man’s land. Ending a film with Indian and Pakistani soldiers in each other’s arms is the laziest kind of daydreaming imaginable.

This review appeared in Mint.