Saturday, May 18, 2013
Aurangzeb
Emperor of Gurgaon
Set amidst the real estate wheeling-dealing
of the Delhi-NCR region, Atul
Sabharwal’s Aurangzeb gives just a
small peek into the rampant corruption, violence and lawlessness of a place where wealth and power are to kill for.
Then the plot zooms right into the
implausible realm of ‘this can happen only in the movies’. The narrator is Arya (Prithviraj Sukumaran),
a corrupt cop, part of a family of greedy rotten eggs. His father (Anupam Kher)
had to leave the force in disgrace, but he, his uncle Ravikant (Rishi Kapoor)
and cousin (Sikander Berry) carry on their “collection business” with impunity.
Ravikant, however, wants more power, and for
that he has to neutralize Yashwardhan (Jackie Shroff), the biggest gangster in
the city, who runs a clean front, but lets his partner Neena (Amrita Singh) do
all the “deals.” Ravikant stumbles on to
a secret—Yash’s wife (Tanvi Azmi) and son Vishal (Arjun Kapoor) believed to
have died in a police encounter years ago, for which Arya’s father had taken
the hit.
Vishal’s twin, Ajay was left behind with his
father, and has turned out to be the typical hard-drinking, coke-snorting,
violent Gurgaon thug. Ravikant switches
the boys, and gets an invaluable mole inside Yashwardhan’s
empire.
The plot gets more convoluted and unbelievable,
the characters’ motivations get fuzzy and divided between “sapne” and
“apne”. Ravikant is solely driven by
greed for power, the others dilly dally between love (the romantic interest is
a vapid Sasheh Agha who bare back is seen more often than her face), family and
duty. In the end, you wonder, if empires can be so easily grabbed and enemies
so conveniently eliminated, then what was the point of planting Vishal there in
the first place?
Arjun Kapoor’s double role doesn’t really
amount to much—he does well, but when Rishi Kapoor is in the film, it’s
impossible to better his performance. He
gets the bulldog like persona just right and shows just how character
development and actor’s instinct works. All the youngsters in the film, need a
master class from this great actor.
The film ends with a cop saying, they do
their job for “rupiya” (money) and “roab” (power) —they have got the first, now
how about asserting the second. Knowing
what Delhi cops are like, that’s an alarm bell!
Labels: Cinemaah
