Cinemaah

Burning Plains


Aakrosh may not be a typical Priyadarshan film, since the director is now associated with comedy—but it looks like so many of his films. Set in a North Indian town, but obviously shot in the South, this brazen lift of the powerful Mississippi Burning, easily substitutes Dalit-Thakur clashes for Black vs White in 1960s America; the Ku Klux Klan is  turned into Shool Sena, and voila, the story is Indianised.

Ajay Devgan and Akshaye Khanna play CBI investigators who come to a dusty town called Jhanjhar to probe the disappearance of three boys, and encounter walls of hostile silence. The local cops led by the brutal and corrupt Ajatshatru (Paresh Rawal) are hand-in-gloves with the upper caste families and treat the lower castes with contempt.

The key to the case lies with a Thakur girl (Amrita Pathak)  and the cop’s wife (Bipasha Basu), who are scared silent.  The presence of the cops triggers off caste wars, and, as a senior cop says, the investigation of the three boys leads to over 300 deaths.

One can only imagine a superior film in the hands of Prakash Jha who would understand the caste dynamics, lethargy and corruption in a north Indian town,  Priyadarshan is clearly more interested in the elaborately staged action—a long chase, very well shot by Tirru S, ends in the death of a minor character; another imaginative sequence of the two cops chasing a jeep via its dust trail is exciting, but as pointless.

The film with its sluggish pace and no nerve-stretching tension between the cops who belong to disparate worlds, remains at a superficial level, and dull as the dusty plains of the location. Ajay Devgan does not display his usual intensity, and Akshaye Khanna ends up making faces under a bad wig.

An item song and a glam flashback of the sari-clad, glum Bipasha Basu are inserted, but to no avail.  Priyadarshan really needs to give himself and his audiences a break from his plagiarized offerings.

Dial M For Mayhem



All of Mani Shankar’s earlier films reveal his penchant for gizmos, and Joel Schumacher’s Phone Booth (2002) offered him a readymade plot. It’s just that, plagiarism has become a bit tougher, thanks to Hollywood’s vigilance.

The Schumacher film was a taut thriller about a man trapped in a phone booth by an unseen sniper, whose menacing voice created all the tension in the film.  Here, the sniper (Sanjay Dutt) is seen and he is a garrulous man, who sets up elaborate technical networks around a new phone booth in Mumbai’s swanky new business district, on the assumption that his prey, an investment banker Bachchu (Irrfan Khan) will stop at that booth to make calls, will answer the phone when it rings and have an altercation with a junkie, who gets killed, bringing along a posse of cops and media— the latter represented by a reporter Nidhi (Kangna Ranaut with puffed up lips and a lisp) who lands up in a strapless dress and six inch stilettos to cover a crime story.

In terms of building up layers of intrigue and suspense, Knock Out is also inspired by A Wednesday, but it is even more far-fetched.  Still, for some time, it is amusing to see Bachchu (Khan has been given a weird curly mop with tendrils falling on his face) spar with the sniper and not being able to figure out just what he did to annoy the man.  Shankar uses the amateurish device of tell-and-show, so every time something is mentioned, it is recreated visually too.

After a while, the game gets tedious, and the background to it all, increasingly bizarre. There is a politician called Bapu (Gulshan Grover—and quite insulting to the real Bapu) whose greed is behind what is going on. The cops, as usual, are clueless or corrupt or both, and are outwitted by the Nidhi most of the time.  And towards the climax, the film gets all patriotic and preachy.

A film with an implausible plot, set mostly at one location, and without any distractions like songs and comic tracks, needed to be tight, fast-paced and no-nonsense.  Knock Out starts sagging even before the interval, and loses sympathy for the victim rather quickly.  None of the performances really stand out—those who have not seen Phone Booth might find some novelty here.  May not be worth the price of a multiplex ticket, but okay for a one-time watch on home video.