Guldasta

Shootout at Lokhandwala (SaL) is so trashy I did not want to write a review in the first place. Because that means revisiting the movie in your mind. Yuck! I’d rate this movie at 1/5 and that single point is only because of the last 20 minutes of the movie, else I would have given it a zero.

Talk of recycled cinema! If you have seen Satya, Company, D and recently Sarkar and Black Friday, I would say you have seen most (if not all) of what Hindi Cinema has to offer on Mumbai underworld. To that list I would add Sarfarosh, Shool and Seher as great movies from recent years where the protagonist is a policeman. SaL is not even a shadow of these movies.

SaL is the story of a shootout that took place on 16 November 1991 at a residential apartment called Svati in Lokhandwala, Mumbai. The gangsters under fire are Maya Dolas and his four accomplices. Vivek Oberoi as Maya is not very convincing and Tushhar as his sharp shooter looks straight out of Santa Claus’s beard – funny and never threatening. Hear him squeak and you cannot but curse the casting director. The movie is full of half-baked caricatures and except for Sanjay Dutt, the rest do not leave any worthwhile impression on your mind. The rest includes Amitabh, Suniel Shetty, Arbaaz Khan, Dia Mirza, Neha Dhupia, Amrita Singh, and Abhishek Bachchan (in a guest appearance). There are three sidekicks hanging around Vivek and the best thing you can do about them is to forget they exist.

I wish the movie had spent more time on the actual shootout rather than meandering through all that history preceding the incident. Because it handles the history very poorly while the shootout is handled OK. The history part is nothing but small incidents somehow stitched together. Add to that lackluster cinematography, over-worked dialogues, wooden faced actors and what you have is the perfect recipe for disaster.

The item numbers are cacophonic and forced into the script. Each time a song comes up, you can hear the director say “I want a formula film”. On the upside, having such songs is a nice break to go visit the loo. Actually, in this movie, it makes no difference when or how many times you visit the loo 🙂

The movie probably lifts ideas from all and sundry. Heres an example: the scene where Arbaaz Khan slowly drives a knife into his opponent’s chest is lifted from the Steven Spielberg movie ‘Saving Private Ryan’ and sadly, the copy is not even a fraction of the original.

And no one told me Her Highness Ekta Kapoor had a finger in this pie. That explains why we have Tushhar as a gangster. Had I known about Ms. Kapoor’s association with the movie I would not have ventured within 100 feet of the theatre. If you are hooked onto any of Balaji’s teleserials, go see the movie. If you are not, spending time with your mother-in-law will be more entertaining.

The movie does bring up an important question – why is there such graphic violence in our cinema today? It is one thing to show people being killed, it is another to show their jaws being pulped and fingers being mashed etc. Repeatedly, the underworld story cinema in India has such graphic violence that I shudder to think of the impact it will have on fertile minds. I refuse to accept that people walking out of a movie do not carry some part of the movie back with them.
Shootout at Lokhandwala glorifies violence and non-democratic procedures to handle criminals. The police, lawyers and law courts gleefully pat themselves on using an encounter route. Had these same institutions not gone to rot, criminals could have been tried and convicted through courts of law. It is the police who have been hand-in-glove with criminals and it is the police that now say “we will kill and not arrest”.

To make matters worse, the movie does not touch upon these questions sufficiently and when it does, the treatment is crass and clearly shows that the director is pre-disposed and simply not interested or not capable of healthy debate.

To conclude, Shootout at Lokhandwala will leave you with a total blackout of your mind.

In short: If you miss seeing Cheeni Kum, you would not have missed much. I rate the movie at 2.5/5.

The more I see movies like Cheeni Kum, the more I come to respect the pivotal role the Director and Script Writer play towards the final outcome. Cheeni Kum could have been great, but ends up with little going for it inspite of honest performances by Amitabh Bachhan and Tabu. The reason is that it is overcooked. The tongue-in-cheek dialogues are one too many and after the first 30 minutes you desparately want to hear some real sentences.

The story is about an acerbic owner of an Indian restaurant in London (Amitabh) who meets his match in a software engineer from Delhi (Tabu); much like fresh lime meeting honey. One thing leads to another and soon they fall in love. But their marriage plans face the wall in Paresh Rawal who simply cannot live with the idea of his daughter marrying a person older than her father.

Most of the time, the humour is trite and repetitive; for example the repartees concerning the umbrella and the cheap references to condoms. I also found the movie to be insensitive in the humour it wishes to derive from the waiter whose teeth are protruding. I could (probably) take the joke one time but when a chef in the kitchen keeps having his fun from the same pair of gums, it starts to get on my nerves. Real fun is all about wit, not about below the belt jokes on someone’s physical appearance.

Then there is Amitabh doing this silly “lets make it out” act that is as cheap as it gets. And when he lies down in the middle of a field wanting to do it right there with Tabu, you know the ship has sunk.

And what is Paresh Rawal doing in this movie? Who wrote that role? His character is a total waste and makes you run for the exit, something I would have done had I not paid through my nose for the ticket.

I definitely felt that the script writer has struggled for all those one-liners. They just do not seem to be free flowing. And that is what kills them. A fact highlighted by the character of Zohra Sehgal. When even she cannot ignite the screen on some occassions, you know there is a problem somewhere.

If you are a die-hard AB fan, go see it. I wonder if there are many die-hard Tabu fans out there, but those who are, will be glad to know she puts in a fine performance and is my choice of best performance in the movie.

There are simply zero surprise packages in the movie. The title song is catchy and hummable. I do not recall anything other than that as far as music goes.

Cheeni Kum is a movie that has namak zyada and will leave you with a not-so-good taste in the mouth.