Saturday, November 09, 2013
Satya 2
Robin Hood of Oshiwara
Is Bollywood going all philosophical on us? Last week’s movie told us Krrish was a ‘soch’ and that everyone has a Krrish in them. Now Ram Gopal Varma’s Satya 2 tells is, the underworld is a ‘soch’ and we might be Company people without even realising it.
Because according to RGV, the underworld is a better alternative to the System, and looks after people better than the System, and till there are inequities in the System, the underworld will exist in one form or the other. But RGV’s new Company is a shady and complicated organisation that can’t be traced, because it’s a ‘soch’ – it kills as it pleases, money is extorted, laundered and sent to offshore accounts, but it is used to help people. You can’t call it crime unless you know the ‘majboori’ or the ‘maqsad’ behind it, says the new Satya (Puneet Singh Ratn—too raw), the Robin Hood of Oshiwara. So all criminals can line up outside RGV’s office to get clean chits.
Right! So, like the 1998 Satya, this one too is a grim, bearded man without a past and without a surname. All he has is a ‘soch’ and a laptop to do ‘research.’ He tells his first benefactor, builder-gangster Lahoti (Mahesh Thakur made to wear a cross dangling from one ear and other eccentric style statements) that to get the Company off the ground, all he has to do is kill one industrialist, one media baron, the police commissioner, and then replace the CM and later the PM with Company plants. All this would be funny if it wasn’t uttered with complete seriousness and accomplished with all that laptop research.
Satya schemes, kills, growls and for fun sings and dances with a pouting, prancing retard called Chitra (Anaika Soti). He also has a best buddy (Amritiyaan) who gives him Mumbai gyaan, and the buddy’s gal (Aradhna Gupta) called Special, whose name has a story behind it, which, presumably, we will hear in Satya 3, which, from all indications, is definitely coming. Be afraid, be very afraid!
If Satya 2 has a redeeming feature, it is that the cops are not shown to be complete dolts! They figure things out rather quickly. Though how a list of people with sudden income spurts can acquired almost overnight in a city of millions is bewildering.
The original Satya was a cops-and-gangsters film with no pretensions, and it lent the genre such an authenticity that other filmmakers followed the template, and RGV himself kept making versions of the story. Here, he tries to take it to another level and falls flat into a vat of absurdity.
And finally, as a nod to Big Daddy, The Godfather, a scene in which a father whose daughter has been raped approaches the underworld for help, since the System fails him. Enough said!
Labels: Cinemaah
Sunday, November 03, 2013
Krrish 3
Where's The Jadoo?
When Rakesh Roshan made Koi Mil Gaya in 2003, sci-fi was not a common
Bollywood mainstream genre. There had been some B-grade horror and comic book
rip-offs, but nothing done with a big budget and a mega star. The film was
inspired by ET, but back then,
plagiarism was accepted—all okay, unless the filmmaker was caught and sued.
He then took the story forward as Krrish (2006) and created a home grown
superhero. By the time Krrish 3 comes out, other superhero films have been made
and many others watched by audiences as all the big Hollywood superhero films have been dubbed.
Still, the publicity blitz is enough to ensure a monstrously big opening
weekend, after that it would depend on how much tolerance people have for this
mish-mash of Hollywood ideas and old-style Bollywood family melodrama.
Even for a film that demands suspension of disbelief, the science is
hilarious – Rohit Mehra (Hrithik Roshan) the genius rescued by his superhero
son Krrish (also HR) in the last film, is now working in a lab, and also
pottering around at home on a solar power experiment using mirrors and a pen
(really!) that displays its brand in just of the many examples of shameless and
distracting product placements. The experiment will bring to life dead plants
and maybe dead people, but when he tries it, it doesn’t quite work. So he says,
“Energy mein zyada power aa gaya,” and concludes that it needs a dimagwala filter. This foreshadows a
scene in which.... oh never mind, will avoid spoilers.
The bad guy is Kaal (Vivek Oberoi), a quadriplegic with telekinetic
powers, who wants to wipe out the human race and replace it with his half
human-half animal mutants he calls ‘maanwars.” But to do that, he needs bone
marrow with the right DNA, so as he experiments with DNA, he builds a fortune
first injecting countries with deadly viruses and then selling them expensive
antidotes. Six scriptwriters (with a
collection of foreign DVDs) and one dialogue writer worked on this? The mind
boggles.
Krishna Mehra or Krrish, meanwhile, takes up a succession of menial jobs
(why?) and loses them because he has to double up as Krrish and save
malfunctioning planes and errant kids from falling down. The newsreader wife, Priya (Priyanka Chopra)
is around to sing and dance and get kidnapped in pregnant condition. The bad girl
Kaya (Kangana Ranaut) has more fun. She wears a tight PVC costume and ugly
braid; she was cloned with chameleon blood so can shape shift. She also gets to
wear bizarre get-ups and do a dream sequence in the desert.
The other mutant that gets decent footage is a frogman with a superlong
tongue, which is used for two of the yuckiest action scenes ever. For kids, the grisly virus epidemic scenes
would be too disturbing, and Krrish 3
is meant for children. Which sensible adult could sit through such non-stop
nonsense...unless of course they went looking for a comedy—this one has more
laughs than all the comic films of this year put together.
Labels: Cinemaah
