Saturday, May 04, 2013
Shootout At Wadala
Gangs Of Mumbai
Sanjay Gupta’s Shootout At Wadala, pulls off a very clever
trick. It piques viewer interest, by publicising the ‘real’ story
aspect of the film (based on parts of S. Hussain Zaidi’s book Dongri to
Dubai) —the first recorded encounter of a gangster in Mumbai, back in
1982. But instead of a Scorsese-like study of socio-economic
conditions and racial tensions (wrapped up in period grandeur) that built the
gangs in the US, Gupta proceeds to make a rabble-pleaser, with three ‘item’
songs, dialogue peppered with cusswords, a sprinkling of sex, lots of violence,
terrific chase and killing sequences, plus the Greek God physique of John
Abraham. Why won’t the target audience of goggle-eyed men, enamoured of gangland
legends flock to it?
Gupta’s realism is, of
course, selective and manipulative. By turning his protagonist
Manohar ‘Manya’ Surve (Abraham) a nice chawl boy in love
(Kangna Ranaut as the vapid girlfriend) wanting to study and escape that life,
into a victim of police brutality, the audience’s sympathy shifts towards Manya
and stays there. Also, the role of then powerful gangster Varadarajan Mudaliar
in getting Manya killed is conveniently dropped.
The other real life
characters are given fictitious names, which gives Gupta leeway to take
liberties with the actual rise and death of Manya—the daring escape from
prison, for instance, was not so spectacular in real life; Manya had been taken
to hospital from where it was easy for him to run away.
There are also the standard
scenes of the innocent in prison, building his body, thrashing the bully and
becoming the leader. A film like this, made with the purpose of
mythologizing a man who was a bandit, extortionist and crook, automatically
calls for grandiose confrontations with rival gangsters, a lot of dialoguebaazi and
muscle-flexing. The two men who take a backseat in this film--but
there’s a movie about them in the making-- are the Kaskar brothers, called
Haskar here—Dilawar (Sonu Sood) and Zubair (Manoj Bajpayee), obviously Dawood
and Sabir.
For audience with good
memories, this sort of gangster film is one big cliché, so many
scenes are lifted from other films, it’s hard to keep track—Satya (of
course!) and Once Upon A Time in Mumbaai come immediately to
mind. But Gupta adds large dollops of cinematic swagger to the
scenes—for instance, Manya’s bare-chested, BEST bus-hijack to save his friend
Munir (Tusshar Kapoor). The director and his DOPs also capture the by lanes of
Dongri and the Muslim core of Mumbai with an expert eye for detail.
The encounter cops are
represented by Anil Kapoor and Ronit Roy, who are frustrated at being shackled
by the law, when gangsters run around freely. In a silly device,
Gupta has a Manya Surve with a dozen bullet holes in his body, tell his story
to the accompanying cop (Kapoor) and even recalling scenes in which he wasn’t
present.
Shootout at Wadala will work wonders for John Abraham. He easily
eclipses better actors than himself, by his magnetic presence. Even if he
doesn’t win acting awards, his work in this film, will take his career to a
higher plane.
Labels: Cinemaah
Comments:
Post a Comment
