Saturday, August 29, 2015
Phantom
Revenge Served Tepid
There was Munich, and there was Zero Dark Thirty and heck, now there’s Phantom. The difference is not that the first two are based on true stories and the last is a wish-fulfillment fantasy (a film you wish were true, the tagline states) but that the fictional film cannot beat reality. Even D-Day and Baby did a better job of the ‘avenging India’s honour’ theme than Kabir Khan’s Phantom.
Seven years after the 26/11 attacks on Mumbai, when none of the masterminds have been apprehended, a fiery-eyed, teeth-gnashing, RAW man (Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub) suggests to his boss (Sabyasachi Chakrabarty) that a covert mission be undertaken to kill the terrorist leaders, who planned the Mumbai attacks. The government cannot sanction the mission, and the person who undertakes it has to go alone, get no credit, and if he dies, no acknowledgment. They find such a man – a Phantom--feeding chickens on a remote mountaintop, sulking his military disgrace away in solitude.
So far, the plot (taken from Hussain Zaidi’s novel Mumbai Avengers) follows the template of dozens of such vigilante justice movies in which a former soldier or intelligence operative is dragged back into the field. What happens afterwards is spectacularly silly.
The way the killings are carried out are preposterous. Even though the Phantom aka Daniyal Khan (Saif Ali Khan) and his reluctant Parsi helper Nawaz Mistry (Katrina Kaif) go globe-trotting, the pace is sluggish. A film like this should have been exciting and cathartic—it is really frustrating for Indians to watch helplessly as the country becomes a terror target—but there is not a scene in which the pulse pounds or the emotions are churned. This has as much to do with the boring script as with the miscasting of Saif Ali Khan as Katrina Kaif, whose one-expression performances (he scowls, she pouts) do nothing to help the film.
Khan made the equally comic-bookish Bajrangi Bhaijaan work by simply casting Salman Khan; Phantom also needed an action hero with a better connect with the viewer. With all the resources at its disposal, it’s too bad that Phantom is not a first-rate, crackling thriller.
Labels: Cinemaah
Sunday, August 23, 2015
Manjhi :The Mountain Man
Mad Obsession
In spirit, Ketan Mehta’s Manjhi :The Mountain Man is like Last week’s release Gour Hari Dastaan—they are both about men with a cause and superhuman perseverance.
Dashrath Manjhi (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) is a low-caste man in a feudal Bihar village ruled by the typical cruel landlord (Tigmanshu Dhulia). When his beloved wife Phagunia (Radika Apte) dies after slipping down a hillock and it takes too much time to take her to the hospital in the next village across the stony hill range, the bereaved husband takes it upon himself to cut through the rocks and make a path, just with a hammer and chisel. It takes him 22 years, but he accomplishes the near-impossible task.
The film is based on a true story, which makes the man’s life all the more admirable—and Siddiqui makes the character his own, right down to the rags, scraggly hair and mad glint in his eyes. But somehow the story loses its grip after a while, because Mehta is unable to place it within a larger context.
There are nods to the rampant casteism in Indian villages, but he rushes through a Naxal episode, the Congress politics of the time, Indira Gandhi’s ‘Gareebi Hatao’ slogan, bureaucratic corruption—he ticks all the boxes, but Manjhi’s story remains strangely uni-dimensional. There are a few really powerful scenes, like Manjhi surviving a harsh drought, but also baffling ones like his march to Delhi to meet the prime minister which ends tamely. There is the melodrama of his chopping his toe off when bitten by a snake, but when it comes to his mindset, Mehta resorts to the hoary trick of having his dead wife appear to egg him on. The romance itself is a bit too ‘filmi’, including the gift of a miniature Taj Mahal, to underline the parallel between Shahjehan’s act of love and Manjhi’s obsession.
Nawazuddin Siddiqui is worth watching, and perhaps he is at a stage of his career now, when people might go to see him. The film, in spite of its inspiring character remains mostly flat and uninvolving.
Labels: Cinemaah
All Is Well
Waste of Talent
Rishi Kapoor’s selection of films in the second phase of his career has been mostly good, so it’s puzzling why he chose to do All Is Well. Maybe the director Umesh Shukla’s Oh My God reputation stood him in good stead, which is why he also managed to cast Abhishek Bachchan and Supriya Pathak.
Kapoor plays Bhajanlal Bhalla, a baker in a small Himachal town, an obnoxious man who is constantly verbally abusing and harassing his wife Pammi (Pathak) and son Inder (Bachchan). Bhalla wants his son to take over his business (though it is not exactly thriving), but as soon as he gets a chance, Inder leaves for Bangkok to become a singer. His romance with Nimmi (Asin) also fails because of his commitment phobia, but she hopes to change his mind through the positive-thinking guide, Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret, even after she is about to be married to another man.
Inder returns a decade later to get the money due to him after selling his father’s bakery and walks into the trap set by some bumbling goons led by the long-haired Cheema (Mohammed Zeeshan Ayub), who are after Bhalla for repayment of loans. The film and its characters get into road movie mode and go round in circles. It is all quite bizarre and random, with humour mined out of Bhalla’s weak bladder and Pammi’s strange dementia. Jumping into the fray are cops, various family members and Sonakhi Sinha as the ‘item girl.’
Perhaps because of the problems while making the film—Smriti Irani dropped out, and many scenes had to be reshot—there are gaps and continuity glitches in the film. Moreover, director Shukla is not sure if he wants to make comedy or a moral fable about family values. There may have been a good idea about dysfunctional families (a Hollywood staple) in there, but the way the film turns out, the viewer can only feel sorry for the actors—particularly Rishi Kapoor—who did not deserve to be in this mess.
Labels: Cinemaah
