Watch Bollywood for a while, and you’ll soon realize that copyright law is different
in India. Tunes are lifted wholesale from popular Western songs.
Dialogue, scenes, and entire plotlines are “borrowed” from Hollywood on a
regular basis. So what happens when an Indian movie producer decides
he really, really wants to make a Bond movie? You get Mr. Bond (1992).
Of course, the translation isn’t exact. Bollywood Bond (Akshay Kumar) doesn’t work for the British Secret Service, he’s a Mumbai police inspector. (And it’s just Bond. No James.) And while the nefarious Dragon (Pankaj Dheer) is an international crime lord and cartoon supervillain with a horde of ninja henchman, his motives and methods are decidedly more mundane than, say, Goldfinger. There are no gadgets. The most surprising change, though, is that the opening credits do not feature a number of scantily clad women writhing around in silhouette to the sounds of the soulful theme song; Bollywood rips off the Bond credit sequences all the time, and I’m astonished that this movie, of all movies, resisted the temptation.
The film opens with not one but two gratuitous action sequences, which serve to establish first that Bond is the finest officer on the force but has a weakness for the ladies, and second that Dragon is an arms dealer with ties to an unnamed foreign power that probably rhymes with “Makistan”, and seeks to destroy India just because.
During these early action sequences, Bond captures Dragon’s brother, Daga (also played by Pankaj Dheer.) Dragon promptly abandons the arms dealing and embarks on a needlessly complicated revenge scheme. He dispatches his ninja minions (including the ubiquitous Bob Christo) to kidnap twenty children of wealthy parents, or rather nineteen children and the very adult Reshma (Manjeet Kullar), who is taken in place of her best friend Sunita (Sheeba).
Bond, meanwhile, busies himself with interrogating Daga, and he does so with noticeably less restraint and concern for civil rights than the average Bollywood policeman. The savage beatings can’t go on forever, of course, and Bond’s superiors soon order the prisoner transferred to Central Jail. Naturally, Dragon uses the opportunity to rescue his brother, and then spout further threats.
Still, evil schemes don’t hatch themselves, so it’s back to work. Dragon demands an exorbitant ransom for the kids, to be paid in gold, and he demands that Bond deliver it by himself. After some drama (Sunita’s father is reluctant to pay that much money for someone else’s child) Bond delivers the ransom. It’s one of the film’s better scenes; Daga takes the opportunity to smack Bond around, with the implied threat of killing the hostages if he fights back, so Bond clasps his hands behind his back and takes it, only to discover that the kids were never there in the first place.
Dragon is very upset to discover that he has been tricked as well; one of the parents paid the ransom in brass, not gold. He quickly kills the minion responsible for checking the gold (poor Bob), and then demands an even larger ransom! In diamonds! To be delivered to Bangkok!
While Mr. Bond shares James Bond’s penchant for womanizing, the film still manages to kowtow to prevailing Bollywood morality by playing Bond’s philandering for laughs. While he romances five or six women (I’ve lost track) over the course of the film, and even manages the classic Bond trick of getting a villainess to switch sides simply because he’s so damned sexy, he never manages to get very far with any of them because he’s constantly being interrupted. And the film ends abruptly before he gets the traditional end-of-movie nookie.
This is a very low budget movie, and it looks it. Dragon’s ninja henchmen wear black shirts, black pants, and white tennis shoes. Dragon himself prances about in red pyjamas and a white wig and moustache that makes him look like the love child of Santa Claus and Fu Manchu. The costuming can’t be blames entirely on the budget, though; the film has that “stuck in the Eighties” look that is common in Bollywood films of the early nineties, with such highlights as Sushita visiting a nightclub wearing shoulder pads so wide she is in danger of taking off, and Bond performing a dance number backed up by his step aerobics class.
As you have no doubt gathered, Mr. Bond is not high art. It’s a silly, bombastic action movie with song and dance numbers inserted, and it performs admirably as such, though it never quite rises to Mr. India level, despite Dragon constantly proclaiming, “Dragon likes it” and “Bond is very dear to me.” Still, very silly and watchable.
Of course, the translation isn’t exact. Bollywood Bond (Akshay Kumar) doesn’t work for the British Secret Service, he’s a Mumbai police inspector. (And it’s just Bond. No James.) And while the nefarious Dragon (Pankaj Dheer) is an international crime lord and cartoon supervillain with a horde of ninja henchman, his motives and methods are decidedly more mundane than, say, Goldfinger. There are no gadgets. The most surprising change, though, is that the opening credits do not feature a number of scantily clad women writhing around in silhouette to the sounds of the soulful theme song; Bollywood rips off the Bond credit sequences all the time, and I’m astonished that this movie, of all movies, resisted the temptation.
The film opens with not one but two gratuitous action sequences, which serve to establish first that Bond is the finest officer on the force but has a weakness for the ladies, and second that Dragon is an arms dealer with ties to an unnamed foreign power that probably rhymes with “Makistan”, and seeks to destroy India just because.
During these early action sequences, Bond captures Dragon’s brother, Daga (also played by Pankaj Dheer.) Dragon promptly abandons the arms dealing and embarks on a needlessly complicated revenge scheme. He dispatches his ninja minions (including the ubiquitous Bob Christo) to kidnap twenty children of wealthy parents, or rather nineteen children and the very adult Reshma (Manjeet Kullar), who is taken in place of her best friend Sunita (Sheeba).
Bond, meanwhile, busies himself with interrogating Daga, and he does so with noticeably less restraint and concern for civil rights than the average Bollywood policeman. The savage beatings can’t go on forever, of course, and Bond’s superiors soon order the prisoner transferred to Central Jail. Naturally, Dragon uses the opportunity to rescue his brother, and then spout further threats.
Still, evil schemes don’t hatch themselves, so it’s back to work. Dragon demands an exorbitant ransom for the kids, to be paid in gold, and he demands that Bond deliver it by himself. After some drama (Sunita’s father is reluctant to pay that much money for someone else’s child) Bond delivers the ransom. It’s one of the film’s better scenes; Daga takes the opportunity to smack Bond around, with the implied threat of killing the hostages if he fights back, so Bond clasps his hands behind his back and takes it, only to discover that the kids were never there in the first place.
Dragon is very upset to discover that he has been tricked as well; one of the parents paid the ransom in brass, not gold. He quickly kills the minion responsible for checking the gold (poor Bob), and then demands an even larger ransom! In diamonds! To be delivered to Bangkok!
While Mr. Bond shares James Bond’s penchant for womanizing, the film still manages to kowtow to prevailing Bollywood morality by playing Bond’s philandering for laughs. While he romances five or six women (I’ve lost track) over the course of the film, and even manages the classic Bond trick of getting a villainess to switch sides simply because he’s so damned sexy, he never manages to get very far with any of them because he’s constantly being interrupted. And the film ends abruptly before he gets the traditional end-of-movie nookie.
This is a very low budget movie, and it looks it. Dragon’s ninja henchmen wear black shirts, black pants, and white tennis shoes. Dragon himself prances about in red pyjamas and a white wig and moustache that makes him look like the love child of Santa Claus and Fu Manchu. The costuming can’t be blames entirely on the budget, though; the film has that “stuck in the Eighties” look that is common in Bollywood films of the early nineties, with such highlights as Sushita visiting a nightclub wearing shoulder pads so wide she is in danger of taking off, and Bond performing a dance number backed up by his step aerobics class.
As you have no doubt gathered, Mr. Bond is not high art. It’s a silly, bombastic action movie with song and dance numbers inserted, and it performs admirably as such, though it never quite rises to Mr. India level, despite Dragon constantly proclaiming, “Dragon likes it” and “Bond is very dear to me.” Still, very silly and watchable.
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