Number 18: Gunday (2014)
How best to describe this Bollywood offering?
I’d say Gunday is like
The Krays meets Scarface with a big serving of rom-com thrown in the mix. And that
is as bad as it sounds.
The first thing I want to mention is the music because out
of everything this is what bothered me most. Calling it background music would
be inappropriate, as this is very much foreground music. It drowns out
everything else on screen, dialogue is barely audible. Ok, I have to watch with
subtitles anyway but it’s still distracting. It’s not even good music, they
just gave some children a variety of instruments and told them to make some
random noises.
Ok, plot and this will require a brief history lesson first.
In 1971, Bangladesh won independence from Pakistan following a bloody conflict.
The aftermath of this with the drawing up of new borders meant in the region of
two million people were ‘displaced’. Amidst this turmoil is where our two
heroes come in, as two young orphan boys (Bikram and Bala) who have escaped
into a refugee camp in India. They do various jobs such as gun smuggling for
one of the guards but this arrangement goes pear shaped when one of them is
pimped out (Bala I think) for some child abuse.
They kill the abuser and escape to Calcutta where they begin
their criminal empire. It seems to be built around stealing coal from trains.
British Gas gone gangster. They become the biggest gangsters in Calcutta and
grow up into male models, who like nothing more than to run merrily across the
plains together (which is kind of true). Bikram (Ranveer Singh) rather reminds
me of Steve Coogan character Tony Ferrino.
Hey, maybe thats one I can pitch to Steve Coogan, Tony Ferrino gets mistaken for a crime boss and is put in prison. Meanwhile, the crime boss is living Tony's life as an international singing sensation but even more annoyingly, is getting better reviews than Tony ever did.
Back to Gunday and a police detective (Irrfan Khan) is
put on their tail of the dynamic duo to bring them down. And that's as far as character development goes for him. Seriously, he should act as their nemesis but all we know about him is he exists.
Clearly this first 30 minutes was too grim for a Bollywood
movie, so the crime gets parked for the next hour and the film turns into a
rom-com. Both guys fall for dancer Nandita, played by the impossibly beautiful
Priyanka Chopra. So Bikram and Bala both try various things to impress her,
including dancing with a fish. Yeah. That happened. More amazing than that, it
seemed to work. So next time you guys want to attract a girl in a nightclub,
bring a fish with you.
It all goes a bit pear-shaped when a visit to the cinema
ends with Bala shooting a guy. He has to leave Calcutta while the heat is on.
This opens the path for Bikram to have Nandita all to himself. Bala hears of
this and gets pissed off so he returns to Calcutta to confront Bikram. They
have a fight in a warehouse which looks like it came out of a Marvel movie. It’s
a good thing they both remembered to oil their chests beforehand. Otherwise the
whole thing would have looked ridiculous.
Actually, the Marvel comparison is quite appropriate as a
lot of the time it does seem like they are being presented as superheroes.
After a revelation about Nandita that comes as a shock to
nobody, the police now feel they have enough evidence to take the
not-quite-brothers down.
The two are re-united as they have one final showdown with
the police but still make time for a last oiled up run together.
At two and a half hours, it feels short for a Bollywood film
but at least 30 minutes too long for anywhere else. It always feels to me when
watching Bollywood stuff that every scene could have been done in half the
time. I guess that’s just their style.
The uneven tone of going between gritty crime thriller and
whimsical romantic comedy does the film no favours. If it knew what it wanted
to be this could have been ok but as it is, Gunday
comes off as an awful mess.
With awful music. Awful, awful music.
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