I am a fan of
remakes and movies that are inspired from an original script. My only expectation is that the guys who remake
it add value to it and not degrade the good work done by someone – in this
case, a monumental piece of work that threw in the concept of “The Angry Young
Man” into Bollywood. A piece of work
that has just been smashed to smithereens by a team that obviously doesn’t understand
the value of Zanjeer (1973).
Before the
thought of watching the version of Zanjeer that has hit the screen a few hours
back, please spare a bit over 2 hours to watch the original version from 40
years back on you tube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHNnBvC8_vs. It may be a bad print (with the severed
edges) but it will still be several times the disaster that Aporva Lakhia has
thrown at us.
In fact, even
the trailer of the old movie will be far superior to what I have had to
tolerate today. I was having a
conversation with a good “movie” friend about the value of Salim-Javed scripts
and how, no matter how outrageous they may have been in terms of action
sequences and song and dance, there was always as flow. A reason for something to happen and an
effort to establish a premise.
Apoorva Lakhia
on the other hand markets the movie with shots that resemble the original and
filling everything in between with twaddle.
ACP Vijay Khanna (Ram Charan) gets nightmares of a man on a horse. That doesn’t explain why he is angry and
beats up politicians in broad daylight in Hyderabad. But it ensures his transfer for the 17th
time in 5 years – I would have thought it was sufficient to suspend / dismiss.
He moves to
Yellow Stone Police Station, Colaba, Mumbai and is welcomed to Mumbai by his
boss, the commissioner, also Vijay. He
says, “Kuch log Mumbai aane ke liye marte hain.
Aur kuch aake marte hain” (Many cops are dying to get a Mumbai posting
but some get posted and die). Hello? Are
you my boss or part of the bad guys? Some encouragement please?
Nevertheless,
our man settles in and his first case happens to be an IAS office who topped
the 1994 batch but is foolish enough to try and shoot a bunch of guys from the
oil mafia siphoning fuel from a petrol pump.
Of course, they are also foolish enough to set him on fire – at the
petrol pump. Nothing happens to the
petrol pump. But the IAS officer dies.
The goons
however leave a witness – Mala (Priyanka) who happens to be from NY and had to
desperately relieve herself thanks to the shots she had at her facebook friend’s
wedding for which she came all the way from NY.
Of course, she also had to perform an item number at the wedding and
claim that, “Yeh Liver revolver nahin, AK 47 hai, bahut capacity hai” (I can
drink a lot).
I will save you
the effort of going through the trauma by saying that the rest of the movie is
the story of Vijay chasing up the goons who killed IAS officer, finding that it
is Teja (Prakash Raj) who has pictures on the cover of TIME and Forbes. He proceeds to destroy his business and in
between have a good time with Mala. He also
finds out that Teja killed his parents and so kills him in the end.
And yes,
somewhere in between Sanjay Dutt prances around and fights off some goons and
also fights Vijay but becomes his friend etc. etc. etc. Twaddle as I had mentioned earlier. It is painful to go through the first
half. Thankfully, the 2nd
half is short and so u get out of the theatre in a little over 2.5 hours. The entire cast is arduous. It is challenging to sustain the dialogues
and the music is really bad. 2 on 10 for
a really really really bad movie.
Don’t even watch
the trailer on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfdGQ6nbIMU. Watch the original on the link that I mentioned
earlier. And of course, the background music draws inspiration from Dark Knight
and The Untouchables. The Untouchables
also provides inspiration for some scenes along with True Lies.
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