It's not a saga, it's a love story.

 Jaane Tu . . . Ya Jaane Na (2008) isn't trying to be a grand sweeping romance.  It's a quirky little post-college romantic comedy about young people confronting life in the big world outside, but it still managed to become an enormous hit, beloved by an entire generation of young Indians.  (Except for some girls named Aditi, who quickly grew tired of their classmates singing a certain song at them all the time.)

The movie opens with Jiggy (Nirav Mehta), who is on a date with Mala (Renuka Kunzru).  The date is not going well, perhaps because he brought his friends with him: grumpy Rotlu (Karan Makhij), sweet Sandhya, AKA "Bombs" (Alishka Varde), and feisty Shaleen (Sugandha Garg), who is as gay as the producers could get away with at the time.  (Nobody says anything onscreen, so you have to pay attention to who she's dancing with  in the big musical numbers.)  The fact that Jiggy chose to take Mala, who is a flight attendant, to the airport on her day off to meet two other friends doesn't help either.  The flight is delayed, so the friends decide to tell a reluctant Mala a story about Jai (Imran Khan) and Aditi (Genalia D'Souza), the friends they're there to meet.

Jai (Aditi calls him Ratz") and Aditi (Jai Calls her "Meow") are best friends with contrasting personalities.  Aditi is tough and scrappy and prone to big emotions, while Jai is cool-headed and clever and a committed pacifist who solves his problems with words, a talent he demonstrates when he defeats the campus bully Vivek (Padam Bhola) without raising a fist.  Jai was raised by his mother Savitri (Ratna Pathak) to honor the peaceful legacy of his late father Amar Singh Rathore (Naseeruddin Shah), but the truth is that Amar was a brawling Rajasthani noble, and his portrait occasionally comes to life to argue with Savitri about Jai's destiny.  The Rathores have three prerequisites for manhood (get in a fight, go to jail, and ride a horse) and Jai doesn't seem likely to complete any of them.

Aditi's parents (Anuradha Patel and Jayant Kripalani) invite Jai over to ask about his impending marriage to Aditi, which is a huge surprise to both of them.  They announce that they have no intention of marrying each other, and instead decide to set each other up with suitable mates; Jai wants someone sweet and sensitive and romantic, while Aditi wants someone macho who can protect her.

Jai finds his match first.  Meghna (Manjari Fadnis) is sweet and dreamy and honestly kind of annoying, though Jai doesn't seem to notice.  Aditi does, though, and she also notices that Jai is spending all his time with Meghna rather than her, and she's not as okay with it as she thought she would be.  Aditi ignores her feelings and accepts a proposal from Sushant Modi (Ayaz Khan), who is rich and charming and has a black belt and a possessive streak, as demonstrated when he fights two Rajasthani cowboys (Sohail and Arbaaz Khan, Salman Khan's brothers) who were dancing with his ex girlfriend.  It's not as much fun as Aditi expected, but she ignores the obvious red flags and carries on.

Jai meets Meghna's toxic parents, and it quickly becomes clear that her whimsy is a defensive measure, and she really needs all of the therapy.  Aditi tells Sushant that she would like to attend film school in New York before marriage, and he does not react well at all.  Everybody knows that Jai and Aditi belong together (even Mala knows!) but will they figure it out?  (Obviously yes, since this is a story that they are telling Mala about how Jai and Aditi got together, but it's the journey, not the destination.)

So why was this movie so popular?  I have a few theories.  First, while it's a light and fluffy romantic comedy, it's a well-crafted light and fluffy romantic comedy.  The frame story is used to good effect, the friends all share an easy chemistry, and the always splendid A. R. Rahman provides the music.

Second, the movie respects its characters.  Aditi gets to remain tough and spunky and doesn't have to get "glammed up" to get Jai to notice her.  And while Jai is obviously going to complete the three requirements for Rathore manhood along the way, he doesn't have to morph into an action hero. Jai is still the same cool-headed pacifist at the end of the film.  He throws exactly three punches in his fight scene, and he makes it very clear that it's a special one time thing.

And finally, despite the frame story and a few surreal elements (like the talking portrait and the recurring Rajasthani cowboys) it's a very grounded movie.  It's not an aspirational saga, it's a look at some ordinary young people dealing with complex emotions.  It happened to come out at the right time, and like Dil Chahta Hai before it, it captured the zeitgeist.

No, the other Skaktiman.

 

 Shaktimaan (1997-2005) is a long running TV serial that finally answers the question "What if Clark Kent was Captain Marvel?", starring Mukesh Khanna as the stalwart superhero who always makes the right choice.  Shaktiman (1993) is an action movie and family drama featuring Mukesh Khanna as an ordinary man who makes a number of questionable choices.  It's important to know the difference.

Khanna plays Diler, who manages the Shimla home of Rai Bahadur Laxminarayan (Kulbhushan Kharbanda).  Diler's wife Parvati (Anjana Mumtaz) has just given birth to a son, and while Rai Bahadur is happy for his employee, it's a painful reminder that he and his wife Lakshmi (Beena Banerjee) cannot have children.  Diler overhears his employers wishing to adopt his child, and over Parvati's objections he makes the offer, certain that this will give his son a better life.  The deal is made, and Lakshmi and Rai Bahadur name the boy Vikram, or Vicky, which is a dangerous choice.  Nine times out of ten in Bollywood, a character named Vicky is going to be a spoiled college bully, and there's a high correlation to being played by Gulshan Grover..

The Laxminarayans return to Bombay.  (It won't be called Mumbai until 1995.)  Three years pass, and it turns out that Lakshmi is pregnant.  The family return to Shimla, and Rai Bahadur is immediately called back to Bombay.  It's terrible timing; Lakshmi promptly meets with an accident and dies just after giving birth.  Diler makes another poor choice and tells Parvati that they should kill the baby, ensuring that nothing disrupts Vicky's cozy life.  She is rightly horrified and flees with the baby, and when Rai Bahadur returns Diler tells him that Lakshmi and the baby both died, and he's already cremated them so there's no need to investigate any farther.

 Parvati arrives in Bombay, but she has no idea how to find Rai Bahadur, so she settles into a life of grinding poverty in order to provide for the baby, who she names Amar.  Time passes, and then the movie becomes a college romance.  Amar (Ajay Devgn) is now a stolid working class hero who loves  his mother.  He also loves Priya (Karisma Kapoor), a lovely and charming rich girl who happens to be the daughter of the Police Superintendent (Parikshit Sahni), a fact which will be important later.

Vicky (Gulshan Grover) has turned out to be a spoiled college bully with his own little posse of henchmen.  He manages to be worse than the usual Bollywood Vicky, in fact; Adult Amar is introduced beating up Vicky to stop him from assaulting a female classmate, but nobody bothers to tell anybody about the assault, so Vicky doesn't face any consequences.  (This will also be important later.)

The college romance section establishes character, but nothing much actually changes.  Amar loves Priya, and she loves him.  Vicky continues to be a creep, and is continually plotting to get rid of Amar so that he can have Priya, but she's not interested and responds with pranks.  They go to Shimla on a school trip, and then come back.  There's a little fighting.

 

Vicky is being spoiled by his father's secretary/comic relief Dimagchand (Tiku Talsania). who does nothing to curb his bad behavior.  Diler, who has repented of his terrible choices and become a taxi driver, occasionally pops up and gives the boy Shaktimaanish advice, hoping to set his secret son on the straight and narrow, but as far as Vicky is concerned he's just a random cab driver and not worth listening to.

 The genre shifts again when Amar leaves college to become a police officer.  Vicky goes from bad to worse, which fits in with the plans of crime lord Tiger (Ajit).  Tiger lends the boy money as part of a scheme to punish Rai Bahadur for testifying against his son.  

And then things get complicated.  Priya, who is apparently still in college, is harassed by another student (Shashi Kiran), which makes her so angry that she publicly threatens to kill him.  Vicky is so angry that he actually does kill him; this is not really to protect Priya, he's just drunk and territorial.  Tiger and his men quietly take pictures of the murder, while Diler, who happens to be passing by, takes the body and sends Vicky away.  Diler drives around trying to find somewhere to hide the body, and winds up stashing it in the trunk of a parked car . . . which happens to belong to Priya.  She discovers the body and decides to hide it rather than tell the police, by which I mean her father and Amar.  And while she's trying to hide the body she's spotted (and photographed) by Vicky.  

So, Priya is being blackmailed by Vicky, who wants her to marry him.  Vicky is being blackmailed by Tiger, who wants to use the young idiot to help him get revenge and money.  Amar is placed in charge of the murder investigation, because of course he is.  Diler is tormented by his misdeeds, both old and new.  And Parvati is still hoping that she will somehow find her husband and everything will be fine.  (Everything is not fine.)

Shaktiman's plot is not anything really new or groundbreaking; it's basically four stock Bollywood plots in a trenchcoat, and each of the plots have been done better in other movies; there are noticeable plot holes.  On the other hand, the elements of the plot are presented well.  Gulshan Grover gets a bit more screen time than usual for his weasely villain act, and even manages a bit of pathos.  Ajay Devgn beats people up with style and enthusiasm and fight choreography lifted from Jackie Chan movies.  Mukesh Khanna makes a fine tragic hero.  And nobody sells a dance number like Karisma Kapoor.

 

This is a very early 90s Bollywood movie.  (You can tell by the costumes.)  It's not exactly good, but there's always something going on.

 

Sisters are doin' it for themselves.

 

 Cinematic universes are hard.  Movies are hard to begin with, but it can be tricky to figure out just how interconnected you want to be.  There's a scale between "basically unrelated movies apart from the odd reference or cameo" and "really really just a series of sequels with pretensions."  So genuinely, credit where credit is due: Alpha (2026) add new characters and concepts to Yash Raj Film's Spy Universe, which does keep it from ending up as "The adventures  of those three guys, and one of them is married to Katrina Kaif," like Rohit Shetty's Cop Universe.

 The movie opens with a look at the past of Vikrant Kaul (Anil Kapoor), who became the new chief of R&AW at the end of War 2.  It is 1999, and in the aftermath of the Kargill War, Kaul is working with Colonel Fateh Singh Lakhawat (Bobby Deol) to create a super soldier to create a super soldier program called Alpha.  Three years later, the first batch of super soldiers is ready, and after a staged demonstration Alpha is approved.

 During the presentation, Fateh mentions that in addition to enhanced strength, speed, and senses, the super soldiers also have heightened healing abilities, and Kaul is paying close attention.  His wife Janaki (Dia Mirza) is pregnant, but that pregnancy is very dangerous due to a congenital heart condition.  Kaul steals a dose of Alpha and secretly doses Janaki, and suddenly the pregnancy is going well and the heart condition seems to have gone away.  And that's when they discover that all of the test subjects have suffered from cerebral hemorrhages.  Including Janaki.

Janaki dies, but the baby has survived.  The Alpha program is shut down.  And that's when Fateh executes one of the classic Bollywood action movie plots; he takes the baby, replacing her with a stillborn child, leaving Kaul devastated and Fateh free to treat the girl, who he names "Sita", as his personal science project.  Sita grows up conflicted but loyal to her adoptive father, who trains her in combat skills while scientist Dr. Varghese (Dibyendu Bhattacharya) draws her blood every week and gives her a guinea pig on her twelfth birthday, which is a bit on the nose.

Years pass.  Sita grows into a skilled assassin.  And after eliminating all of the officials who signed off on Alpha, in a variety of creative ways, she returns to Fateh's base, kills a wave of soldiers, and blows the place up, taking the guinea pig with her.  Fateh isn't home during the attack, but Sita is saving him for last, as she explains to Soldier, the guinea pig.  (I'm going to pretend that Soldier was named after the Bobby Deol movie.)  

 R&AW is assigned to find the killer, and Kaul realizes the connection between the victims.  He tracks down Fateh, who brags about the child kidnapping and reveals that he has shaped Kaul's long lost daughter into a weapon, and Kaul somehow manages to resist punching him in the face.  (At this point; obviously there will be facepunching later.)

 But Kaul has a secret of his own.  Fateh kidnapped Sita before discovering that Janaki actually delivered fraternal twins.  Sita's sister Durga (Sharvari) is living in Spain, using her supersoldier abilities as  an extreme athlete.  Durga has always idolized her lost sister, and when she learns that Sita is alive she's enthusiastic about helping to bring her home.  She flies to India, intending to meet her father at his safehouse in Kashmir, but Sita got there first.

Naturally there's a fight scene.  Also naturally, Sita has already learned that Fateh is a villain, and she's really there to talk to Kaul.  Fateh's men arrive, and Kaul insists on staying behind to cover his daughters' escape.  It's a few days journey to the next safehouse, and  that means the sisters have time to bond a bit.  The next safehouse is also attacked, and the sisters have to battle special forces ninjas with the help of Kabir (Hrithik Roshan).  Kabir is more than capable of keeping up with their super soldier skills, and manages to perform stunts that he couldn't do even in his own movie, but once again he stays to cover their escape because this is only a cameo.

The rest of the plot is pretty straightforward.  Fateh wants to harvest Sita's brain in order to create a stable form of Alpha, but once he realizes who Durga is he realizes that he has a backup.  There are fights, there is family bonding, and the true extent of Fateh's villainy is revealed, leading to Kaul punching him in the face.

 The Spy Universe has played with sci fi elements, including the super virus and jetpack fight in Pathaan, but this is straight up superhero stuff; the movie even bills itself as an origin story.  The action is ramped up as well, and that's actually a problem for the film, since there are so many big ridiculous fights that they start to blend together.  I will say that Alia Bhatt and Sharvani make convincing action heroes.

Alpha definitely falls closer to the War corner of the Spy Universe, with a hero whose loyalties are initially unclear.   It also continues the search for human connection that is the underlying theme of the Spy Universe as a whole, contrasting Kaul's fatherly love with Fateh's cynical manipulation.  That's not the only theme explored, though; the super soldier syndrome is named after toxic masculinity, and Fateh makes it clear that that is not a coincidence.  His ideal soldier is really a hyper macho warrior, able to win wars by being tough and macho and free form any emotional weakness.  And he is proven pretty conclusively wrong about that.

There's a lot that I like in Alpha, but as a whole it's incredibly dour and po-faced.  The concept is great, like a blend of Frankenstein and Seeta Aur Geeta, but it's never quite as fun as that sounds. 

 

 

Nothing Up My Sleeve

 

 Dhoom: 3 (2013) has everything you would expect from an entry in the Dhoom franchise: motorcycles, increasingly improbable stunts, terrible police work, male bonding, and an antihero who completely overshadows the series leads.  It also has a tremendous sense of style and some remarkable performances in this silly, silly movie.

The film opens in 1990 Chicago.  Iqbal Khan (Jackie Shroff) and his son Sahir (Siddharth Nigam) have one chance to impress banker Warren Anderson (Andrew Bicknell) and convince the Western bank of Chicago not to foreclose on their fledgling "Great Indian Circus."  It is a remarkable performance, skilled stage magic mixed with Cirque du Soliel style acrobatics, but Anderson is not impressed, because it's not dumb enough.  He explains that circuses are stupid, and people only want to see stupid things.  This is Sahir's villain origin story, so there's really only one way it can end.  Iqbal takes his own life, and Sahir is left (almost) alone and very, very angry.

Years pass.  Sahir (now played by Aamir Khan) is about to reopen the Great Indian Circus, but he has other interests; he's been pulling off spectacular bank jobs, breaking into branches of the Western Bank of Chicago, throwing the money at the crowd, and then escaping through a combination of parkour and genuinely ridiculous motorcycle stunts.  That may be why the Western Bank of Chicago and/or the Chicago PD decide to call in Jai Dixit (Abhishek Bachchan), India's leading motorcycle detective.

Jai naturally brings along his sidekick Ali (Uday Chopra), motorcycle mechanic turned annoying police officer.  They are met at the airport by Chicago PD's Victoria Williams (Tabrett Bethel) and because she is blonde and attractive Uday immediately starts objectifying her despite Jai urging him to act like a professional.

Sahir has been searching for the perfect leading lady for the circus, and that is why nerdy Aaliya (Katrina Kaif) barges in and demands a chance to audition.  Sahir offers her five minutes, and warns that if he looks away for a second it's over.  She delivers a performance straight out of All That Jazz, with added acrobatics.  Naturally, she gets the job.

Jai sets a trap for Sahir, appearing on television to dare the mysterious bank robber to rob again.  Sahir responds by going to meet Jai as himself, claiming to be a concerned citizen with a circus background who once worked with an embittered clown who knew how to vanish from one location and appear in another.  And Jai lets him join in on the planning, even sharing security codes with the civilian he just met.  You might think this is part of a cunning plan on Jai's part, but he's just bad at his job.

sahir strikes again, using his inside knowledge, and escapes with an even more ridiculous motorcycle stunt.  Jai follows in a helicopter and shoots into traffic, wounding Sahir on the shoulder, then realizes that the civilian he gave the access codes to must be the one who used them. He goes to the circus and confronts Sahir, demanding to see his wounded shoulder.  The shoulder is not wounded, Jai is humiliated, and he and Ali are kicked off the case.  (Naturally they keep working the case, because they are maverick cops.)

There's a trick.  The trick is Sahir's identical and autistic twin brother Samar, who has been kept hidden since before Iqbal died for the sake of the act.  Sahir and Samar can perform amazing feats of misdirection since no one knows there are two of them, and that is also really helpful when fleeing the scene of a crime.  Samar is onboard with committing crimes to avenge his father, but he is his own person with his own interests.  He loves spending Sundays out in the world by himself, and he loves Aaliya, who does not know the secret and has no idea that she's been performing with two different men all this time.  Sahir and Samar have a close bond, at least until Jai accidentally discovers that Samar exists and sets out to exploit that.

The action in the Dhoom series escalates from movie to movie, and Dhoom 3 adds gadgets.  Samar's and Sahir's motorcycles are tricked out Bond-style, with impractical grapple guns and the ability to convert to jet skis.  Like the other Dhoom movies, this is a very male world, and Jai's wife Sweety (played in the earlier movies by Rimi Sen) doesn't even get mentioned.  Jai's important relationships are all with men; he's exasperated with Ali, feels betrayed by Sahir, and betrays Samar in turn.  (He does feel terrible about it.)  Ali is a bit creepy around Victoria, but it doesn't go anywhere.  There is some genuine feeling behind Samar's relationship with Aaliya, though.

Dhoom 3 does have two advantages over the previous film, though.  The first is Aamir Khan, Bollywood's "Mr. Perfectionist," who is incapable of phoning in a performance, no matter how ridiculous the movie is.  He acts the hell out of both his characters, and it lifts the film.

The second advantage comes from a simple syllogism.  The movie is set in Chicago.  Bob Fosse co-wrote and choreographed the musical Chicago.  Therefore Dhoom 3 should channel Fosse whenever possible. Aaliya's sizzling audition scene and the movie's opening tap number are clearly Fosse inspired, but there are touches of Fosse sprinkled throughout all the dances, and Sahir spends most of the movie wearing a bowler hat.  It's not the most Fosse thing I've seen come out of Bollywod (that would be the song "Jab Bhi Ciggaret" from the movie No Smoking,) but it does give the movie a strong and distinctive style that the other Dhooms lack.

Eight months of winter.

 

 Tum Bin II (2016) is a loose sequel to the 2001 romantic drama Tum Bin.  It's a very loose sequel, sharing similar themes, some character names, and one small cameo by a recurring character, but those themes make this a throwback to the kind of sweeping romantic drama that ruled Bollywood in the late 90s and early 2000s.  

 Taran (Neha Sharma) and Amar (Aashim Gulati) are a young engaged couple enjoying a skiing holiday in the Alps.  Well, Amar is enjoying it; he's a passionate skier, but Taran doesn't care for the sport.  Still, they have time for a quick love song before Amar goes out skiing alone, is nearly hit by a snowmobile, and falls off a cliff.  When Amar doesn't come back for dinner, Taran calls his father (Kanwaljit Singh), who immediately flies out to join the search for his son.  After nine days, the authorities decide that Amar is obviously dead, and they promise to call Taran if the body is recovered.  Taran and her would-be father in law return home to Scotland to mourn.

If you've ever seen a Bollywood movie, and especially if that movie was Deewana, you  probably suspect that Amar is actually alive.  And you're right, Amar survived the fall and is being cared for by nuns nearby.  He is in a convenient coma, so no one knows who he is and the rest of the plot has a chance to happen.

 Taran mourns for months, and then there's a ray of light in the darkness.  Amar's father introduces her to Shekhar (Aditya Seal), the son of his old friend.  Shekhar has recently lost his own father, and he's had time to process that loss and develop a philosophy about facing your fears and embracing life and love while you still can.  He's happy to share that philosophy with others, and Taran slowly realizes that she just might be ready to listen.  (Shekhar has a lot of thoughts about a lot of things, really; he has an anecdote for every situation, with a tidy moral to go with it.  He's very wise, probably.)

 Taran's dream is to open a patisserie shop, and Shekhar happens to know a great chef living in London, so they drive through the mountains from Edinburgh to London (Bollywood geography at its finest).  The meeting goes well, Taran is happy for once, she drinks too much champagne, and then she goes on a Magic Pixie Dream Rampage, running through the streets with a bottle in her hand.  For a moment she feels like there's hope.

 

 (The sequence is set in London, but was clearly filmed in Edinburgh; I know Victoria Street when I see it.  But that's only fair when so many of the Edinburgh scenes are obviously filmed in Glasgow.)

Shekhar is kind, patient and wise, and Taran can't help but be drawn to him him.  She also can't help feeling guilty about that, but all of her friends and family love Shekhar and think that he can make her happy.  Finally, one of his life lessons ends with a kiss, and finally, eight months after losing Amar, Taran is ready to move on.  And that's when Amar shows up.

This is a Bollywood movie about a love triangle, so there will be tears and speeches and everyone will act nobly and somebody is going to give up the woman he loves so that she can finally be happy.  The triangle is a bit undercut, though, because Amar is so underdeveloped as a character.  We barely get to meet him before he falls off a cliff, and after his return he is earnest and noble and doesn't have much of a personality, while Shekhar is full of anecdotes and inspirational quotes about living your best life and carpeing the diem, and he's hiding a secret that will change everything.  The triangle isn't really balanced, it's scalene rather than isosceles, let alone equilateral.

Still, the movie is a solid weepy if you're in the mood for that sort of thing. 

All You Need Is Cash

 

 The Rutles: All You Need is Cash (1978) is a documentary chronicling the rise and fall of the Prefab Four, Liverpool's favorite sons, the Rutles.  Any resemblance to a real0world supergroup from the 1960s is entirely intentional.  I think the real message here is that it's easier to tell a coherent story about the rise and fall of the Beatles when they aren't real.

 

Eric Idle plays . . . well, Eric Idle plays a lot of parts in this, but he plays the Narrator, a documentarian chronicling the early days of the band.  Band members include Dirk McQuickly (Idle), Ron Nasty (Neil Innes), Stig O'Hara (Ricky Fataar), and Barry Wom (John Halsey), whose real name is of course Barrington Womble.  It is quickly obvious who is supposed to be who; Dirk is Paul, Nasty is John, Stig ("The Quiet One") is George, and Barry ("The Noisy One") is Ringo.  The boys meet in Liverpool, form a band, and after sharpening their act in Hamburg, they are discovered by music entrepreneur Leggy Mountbatten (Terence Bayler.)  The band becomes a huge hit, the idols of millions, and soon they are being chased around Britain and America by hordes of screaming girls.

All of which sounds very straightforward, and it is.  There are absurd moments in this section of the movie; Fifth Rutle Leppo Sitoncliff (Ollie Halsall) is last seen in Der Rat Keller in Hamburg, climbing into a small trunk with a smaller German woman.  But things get much weirder when the Rutles start making their own movies.  "A Hard Day's Rut" is just A Hard Day's Night with a silly title, "Ouch!" manages to be even more problematic than Help!, and "The Tragical History Tour" is . . . from the clip we see, the experience of watching "The Tragical History Tour" is almost exactly the same as watching The Magical Mystery Tour.  Some things are beyond parody. And, the little we see of "Yellow Submarine Sandwich" is more surreal and considerably less coherent than Yellow Submarine.

 The band begins to fall apart, gradually and then all at once.  The group[ establishes an organization called Rutle Corps, an apparently charitable organization which immediately loses enormous amounts of money, despite (or perhaps because of) the efforts of brutal promoter Ron Decline (John Belushi).  Stig is drawn to Arthur Sultan, the Surrey Mystic (Henry Woolf).  And Dirk and Nasty both get married.  Dirk falls for French actress Martini (Bianca Jagger), who is barely a parody of Linda McCartney at all.   Nasty is captivated by German conceptual artist Chastity (Gwen Taylor), who is strongly implied to be the daughter of Adolf Hitler, but at least nobody but Mick Jagger (Mick Jagger) blames her for breaking up the band.  (Apparently Yoko Ono found the character hilarious, so I won't quibble.)

All You Need is Cash is packed with celebrity cameos, particularly Saturday Night Live alumni; it's always nice to see Gilda rRdner.  It's the cameo by actual factual George Harrison as an interviewer asking questions about Stig being attacked by the Hell's Angels in the basement that is the real get, though, putting the mockumentary one Beatle ahead of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

 This is a comedy.  It's full of surreal humor and whimsical asides, which is fitting, considering Idle's career and the movies the Beatles made themselves.  It's also surprisingly more coherent than the history of the Beatles.  Reality doesn't have to be realistic, but little tweaks like having the death rumors be centered on Stig/George rather than Paul make a lot more sense.

 

The family that steals together, heals together.

 

 Con City (2026) opens with an ordinary family suddenly thrust into extraordinary circumstances.  Saravana (Arjun Das) runs a small restaurant with his wife Mithra (Anna Ben).  There is obviously tension in the relationship, but they stay together in order to take care of their wheelchair-bound seven year old son Jeeva (Akhilan), with Mithra's brother Jackie (Yogi Babu) and mother Janaki (Vadivukkarasi) helping with both home and business.  One day Saravana is late picking up Jeeva from school, and by the time he arrives someone else has taken the boy.  Nobody knows who this person is . . . until the family gets a good look at the CCTV footage, and the whole family immediately recognizes the perpetrator.

The film skips back seven years, when the family wasn't ordinary or even a family yet.  Saravana is working for the power company while quietly struggling to repay the loans his mother took out years ago.  Mithra is alone and pregnant, and only discovers that she's been the victim of a real estate scam when she's thrown out of the house she thought she leased.  Jackie is an aspiring actor hoping to fulfill his late father's dreams when he discovers that Janaki has cancer and needs a great deal of money for an operation, and soon.

And so they all make questionable choices.  Saravana begins skimming payments at the power company, then funnels the money through his stockbroker friend Satha (Sathanand) to create a pyramid scheme.  Mithra begins a real estate scheme of her own, and she turns out to be really good at it.  And Jackie and Janaki receive enough money in donations through the charitable trust established by Jackie's father (a former stuntman) to pay for Janaki's operation, only to discover that the doctor is incompetent and she's fine.  Janaki insists that they keep the money and use it to fund Jackie's debut film; he doesn't want to, but she's his mother, so he agrees.

Mithra, Jackie and Janaki all invest their money with Saravana.  Saravana invests the money with his childhood friend Sabari, who promises a large return after a smuggling deal.  But Sabari is killed, everyone's cons manage to collapse at once, and the characters are all brought in by the ferocious police inspector Sundaram (Nanda Gopal).   Sundaram wants to know where the money is, and uses all the police brutality at his disposal to find out, but everyone tells him the truth and he does not believe them.  When it becomes clear that he plans to arrange for them to be killed in "an encounter," Saravana masterminds a jailbreak, and the group stays together; the others are hoping that Saravana will eventually lead them to the money.

Back to the present.  The man on the video taking Jeeva away is Sundaram.  He's found them.  Saravana insists on going back home and turning himself in, hoping that Sundaram will release Jeeva and let the others go.  The others insist on coming along.  But Sundaram is no longer a policeman, he's retired, with a bad gambling habit. He doesn't want them arrested, he wants them working for him, and he reveals that he let them escape; he's been quietly returning criminals to the wild for years, so that he can make use of their talents later.  

This is a con artist movie, so there are schemes within schemes and it's not clear who is playing who until the very end.  It's not the most devious plotting I've ever seen on film, but everything more or less hangs together and the big reveal at the end makes sense.

However the movie is not entirely focused on the cons.  It's also about the fake family evolving into a found family, and learning to trust and rely on each other.  They also manage to avoid the obvious romantic track, at the end Saravana and Mithra are getting along better, and may have moved to a real relationship, but they're still primarily together for the sake of the kid.  It's both refreshing and sensible, since the script doesn't really have room for romance on top of everything else.