IMDB Bottom 100: Number 4 - Himmatwala

Number 4: Himmatwala (2013)

A moment please: this will be the last trip to Bollywood on this journey but please, no tears.

I don’t proclaim to be an expert on Bollywood cinema but there is something that draws you to it: colour! Hollywood is awash with grey, brown and moody blue tints but over in India they have bright greens, pinks and yellows. There are some who think Bollywood should be darker and more gritty, I disagree. It’s reassuring to know in these bleak times that there is still somewhere in the world where brightness still prevails and it’s what gives Bollywood its’ identity. Never change.

That said, it doesn’t stop Bollywood from churning out its fair share of shit. And Himmatwala is shit. An ‘Entertainer’ from director Sajid Khan, who brought us Hummshakals (see number 16), it’s a remake of a film from the 80’s and it’s reassuring to know Indian audiences are just as disdainful toward remakes as Western audiences. And from what I can gather, the original isn’t particularly well loved either.

It promises to ‘take us back to the eighties’ and that at least is true. The first scene is in a nightclub and you can tell it’s the 80’s because there’s a giant Rubik’s cube hanging from the ceiling. It’s 1983 to be exact, which makes the Ghostbuster’s (1984) logo and Top Gun (1986) poster a little pre-mature. There’s a female singer performing what I think might be an Indian-Disco version of The Cure’s Friday I’m in Love. Then it turns into fight club. I’m no expert but I’m sure this didn’t happen in 1980’s nightclubs in India. That’s all just to introduce us to superhero Ravi. Not literally a superhero but he may as well be he is so ridiculously tough.

The main story is in a village outside Mumbai, where Ravi “returns” (why the quotation marks? Wait and see) to see his mother and sister and to take revenge on the cruel landlord who controls the area and had framed his father for murder, Sher Singh. As a young boy Ravi had attempted to murder Singh but had been forced to flee for his life, now he puts the scares on him by beating up some of his goons.

Singh has a daughter, Rekha, who starts as a cruel, spoilt brat and after being humiliated by Ravi, tries to take revenge by releasing a tiger into the village (yes, really). But her plan goes wrong when it looks like the tiger might attack her but Ravi makes the save and wrestles the tiger (it’s as stupid as it sounds). The tiger wrestling is fun when you play the ‘real tiger/man in suit’ game. Ravi then befriends the tiger and sends it on its’ merry way. From this point, Rekha does a 180 and becomes the romantic interest in the film.

There is another sub-plot with Ravi’s sister Padma who wishes to marry Singh’s son-in-law, Shakti. This is all a ruse by Singh to get back at Ravi, as when they are married they treat Padma like dirt, beating her and making her sleep with the cattle. Ravi plots with Rekha to get back at him by having her pretend to be pregnant with his baby so she will have to marry him. India is a more liberal culture than some may think but very conservative in other ways, an unmarried mother for a daughter would bring great shame to Sher Singh. Ravi uses this fake pregnancy to blackmail Singh into giving up his power and returning the land to the villagers.

There is a twist though, because Ravi is not Ravi. The real Ravi died when he was run over by a car, the fake Ravi was a friend from the orphanage they grew up in and was fulfilling the last wish of his dead friend to look after his family. When Singh learns of this falsehood and the false pregnancy, he makes a last attempt to regain power bringing in a team of cage fighters to destroy him.

Lots of awkward wire-fighting later and they finally have Ravi on the ropes when the tiger from earlier makes the save! With his new found feline ally, Ravi finally conquers the meathead army and is about to kill Singh when his ‘mother’ begs him to spare his life. Singh is indebted to Ravi and begs his forgiveness.

Much of the above sounds quite serious stuff but that’s the problem, it’s not. 80% of the movie is played for laughs but the bizarre tonal shifts really jar. For example, there is a scene with Ravi’s sister Padma when she is in the back of a truck with a group of Sher Singh’s goons and it is implied they are about to gang-rape her until Ravi makes the save. The next scene is Singh and his brother-in-law having comedy japes with cartoon sound effects. And that happens ALL THE TIME. Make a choice, you are either a revenge thriller or a light-hearted comedy with characters breaking the fourth wall at random intervals. You can’t be both.

Ravi is ridiculously over the top, he’s not a man, he’s Thor. He can lift and swing a wagon with ease, knives have no effect on him, he can bust a steel lock with a swipe of his hand. His 'mother' is a little too quick to forgive his deception, though.

Rekha also changes a little too fast. She is a really horrible person at the start and , granted Ravi does save her life but to have changed so completely in an instant stretches credibility.

Then there’s Sher Singh’s brother-in-law, Narayan Das. He’s supposed to be comic relief which is probably why he’s in 75% of the movie. With a silly wig and fake moustache, he’s your typical bungling sort. I suppose he’s amusing in his way but he grates a bit seeing him in nearly every scene.

And an outtake reel over the end credits, don’t you just love those?

I know Bollywood has its tendency to melodrama but man, there are limits. I’m also worried director Sajid Khan has an s&m fetish. There is a LOT of whipping that takes place here.

So it’s bye-bye to Bollywood but I know you’re better than this.

IMDB Bottom 100: Number 18 - Gunday

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.

IMDB Bottom 100: No's 22 & 21 - Final Justice and Ram Gorpal Varma's Ki Aag

Number 22: Final Justice (1985)

You know, it’s hard to keep trying to coming up with ways to describe how dull and unremarkable a film is and Final Justice is dull and unremarkable.

It’s hard for me to describe what happened in Final Justice as I was distracted while watching it by a particularly tricky game of solitaire I was involved in. And then there was some paint I had to keep an eye on so it dried properly. Then I watched a kettle boil which was a big mistake as time stopped moving yet the film kept playing.

Another entry from our Italian friends, the film stars Joe Don Baker as the preposterously named Sheriff Thomas Jefferson Geronimo III. This is the third film ‘starring’ Joe Don Baker to make it in the Bottom 100 (Mitchell, Leonard 6). If Al Pacino can be taken as a stamp of quality in a movie (Gigli aside, everyone’s allowed one mistake), then Don Baker can be taken as a stamp of shiteness. All hail our bad movie King!

That’s possibly unfair as I haven’t seen every movie he’s been in but in his 50 year plus career, his name does pop up often in films around the lowest part of the IMDB scale.

The film is about him transporting a criminal to Malta, criminal escapes, Sherriff Thomas Jefferson Geronimo III (think about that, he’s the third person in his family to carry that name and I’m pretty sure they mention he has a son who is presumably Thomas Jefferson Geronimo IV) gets the criminal back after having problems with the local police. They din’t know ha to police ya see? They needed a big ol’Texan to show em how it gets done round these pars.

And oh yeah, Geronimo is fat. They mention it a few times like he’s going to keel over and have a heart attack any moment. He doesn’t and it doesn’t play a part in the overall story at all, so why they made a point of mentioning it and that he has to follow a strict diet I have no idea.

To be fair, there are some semi-decent action scenes but nuttin to write home t’da ranch abou’.

Number 21: Ram Gorpal Varma Ki Aag

Yay, back to Bollywood! They’re films are always so bright and colourful.

Well,…not always.

To clarify, this film is actually called Aag (which I’m given to understand means ‘flames’ but if it doesn’t don’t blame me, I don’t speak Hindi), Ram Gorpal Varma is the name of the director.

Ignoring that bit of shameless self-promotion, there is somewhat a scoop here in that this film features Amitabh Bachchan, which the opening credits cheekily claim to be ‘introducing’. Some might think Bachchan is the star of some 200 movies (even a small cameo in Slumdog Millionaire) and arguably the biggest star in Bollywood history but they’d be wrong as this was where he was first introduced.

There’s a nice twist to this actually as Aag is actually a remake of 70’s film Sholay, which Bachchan was also in as one of the main heroes (he plays a different role here). Except of course he wasn’t in Sholay, because as we know this was his first film.

Aag is about two outlaws recruited by a police chief to take down a mobster. That’s the whole film summarised in 15 words but somehow that gets stretched to nearly three hours. Every scene feels like it could have been done in half the time. I think there's a minimum length requirement for Bollywood and I'm not sure if that was sarcasm or if that is actually a thing.

Songs, of course they’re still there and I have my usual gripes with them. Not the songs themselves (music being very subjective) but never have I felt more like ‘we now interrupt this movie to bring you a music video’ about a Bollywood film then I did here. See, the film is trying to be dark and gritty but the songs just really ruin the atmosphere of it all. I don’t want to see my villain bodypopping.

The background music is all over the place as well. Sometimes it’s 70’s cop show, other times it’s trying to be a western. Which I kind of understand but the levels are all wrong and oft times it drowns out the dialogue.

Where it does shine though, is whenever Amitabh Bachchan is on screen (making his film debut, remember). He plays the main villain, Babban Singh, and he is brilliantly evil. Imagine an older version of Heath Ledger’s Joker from The Dark Knight and you have a good idea of where he’s at. A strong beginning from Mr Bachchan, I can see him having a bright career.

To go back to what I said at the start about Bollywood films not always being bright and colourful, there are some brutal scenes in this. Such as Bachchan playing a game of Russian Roulette with a rival gang boss and another in which he saws a policemans finger off with a hacksaw (and I have to give the director props for using a dark filter in all of debutant Bachchan’s scenes). Unfortunately, these horrific acts of barbarity are usually followed by scenes surrounding the rom-com subplot, rather spoiling the flow of it all.

Worth seeing for a darker side of Bollywood westerners maybe aren’t aware of but there are almost certainly better examples out there.