Dangerous Boys

Aatish: Feel the Fire (1994) is an adaptation of John Woo’s breakout film A Better Tomorrow, so it combines the usual family melodrama and gratuitous dance numbers with elaborately choreographed gunplay and enough testosterone to cause prostate cancer in laboratory rats.

The movie opens with a silent, black and white sequence which quickly and clearly establishes the main characters and their relationships; heroic widow, loving young sons with a devoted best friend, lecherous neighbor, indifferent police, shocking attack, brutal defense, and a desperate bargain. In another movie, this would be an hour’s worth of exposition and flashback, but Aatish hits all the necessary points and then movies on to the actual plot.

As the story begins, Baba (Sanjay Dutt) and his best friend Nawab (Aditya Pancholi) are the very best enforcers that Uncle (Ajit) has working for him. Baba isn’t happy about his life of crime, but it’s the only way he can support his widowed mother (Tanuja) and send his younger brother Avinash (Atul Agnihotri) to study at the police academy.

Avi, of course, doesn’t realize that his brother is a criminal. He’s clearly not studying very hard at the police academy; he really seems more interested in studying the lovely, bubbly, and kind of annoying Pooja (Karisma Kapoor.) Fortunately, a visiting Baba approves of the match.

Baba himself is wonderful and self sacrificing and never asked for anything for himself, but he does kind of like Nisha (Raveena Tandon,) a flower seller who is in return very smitten with him. Encouraged by Avi, Nawab, and Kadar Bhai (Kader Khan), a friendly restaurant owner and Baba’s father figure, he starts a sweet romance which quickly develops to comparing scars while the saxophone music starts playing and the little brother and his annoying girlfriend show up at just the right moment to keep the censors happy.

Everybody’s happy, and so it’s all bound to fall apart. Nisha catches a glimpse of Baba at work, hacking a man to pieces, and decides she no longer wants anything to do with him. During a meeting with rival gang lord Kania (Gulshan Grover), Baba is betrayed and arrested. Nawab avenges Baba’s capture by killing Kania’s beloved younger brother. Kania strikes back by mutilating Nawab’s leg. Uncle is betrayed, murdered, and usurped by his worthless nephew Sunny (Shakti Kapoor.) Avi discovers his brother’s criminal past (and present,) sees his mother murdered right before his eyes, and, blaming Baba, throws himself into police work while neglecting Pooja.

Three years later, Nawab is washing Sunny’s cars, and Avi is waging a one man war against the gangs while nursing a massive grudge against his brother. Baba is released from jail and finds he has to make everything right by shooting lots of people.

This is a movie about men. Women are nice, and of course a mother must be avenged, but there’s no way that romance can compete with the demands of fraternity. This is Gilgamesh and Enkidu, not Romeo and Juliet.

In fact, the central relationship of the film is a sort of brotherly love triangle. Nawab is completely devoted to Baba, and while Baba returns the devotion, it’s clear that Avi will always come first. “You’re my life,” Baba tells Nawab, “But for my brother I can give up my life.” That tension drives the entire plot, and informs every action.