When a remote Indian village is wiped out by a swarm of locusts, CBI agent Anand (played by somebody, but the IMDB isn’t helpful) is called in to investigate. When Anand and his faithful secretary/girlfriend Ruby (ditto) are murdered, it’s time to call in Gunmaster G-9.
The trouble is, Gopi doesn’t really feel like spying, so he’s refusing to check in; he’s too busy dancing in nightclubs and running from apparently random bands of assassins. While escaping from the latest attack, he borrows a motorcycle belonging to spunky spoiled rich girl Kajal (Kaajal Kiran). Kajal is so impressed by his motorcycle riding prowess that she invites herself to stay the night at his apartment so that he can teach her how to ride in the morning, despite the fact that she clearly knows better; according to Kajal, her best friend is Priya, the heroine from Surakksha, and Priya does not remember him fondly.
Meanwhile, Anand’s gullible sister, Anuradha (Kalpana Iyer) is approached by veteran character actor Shakti Kapoor (played by himself), who explains that Anand was his partner before being murdered by the villainous Gunmaster G-9, but since G-9′s only weakness is beautiful women, she can have her revenge. Oh, and Anand also wanted her to marry his good friend Kapoor, so she should totally be his girlfriend. Anuradha immediately transforms herself from demure village doctor to revenge driven femme fatale.
(Okay, the bad guy in the movie isn’t really supposed to be the actor Shakti Kapoor, just an evil businessman who also happens to be named Shakti Kapoor. My version’s more fun.)
And then, well . . . like Surakksha, Wardat doesn’t really have much of a plot. Gopi, Kajal, and Gopi’s allegedly comic sidekick Kabadi (still played by Jagdeep) wander around for a while getting into random fights with Kapoor’s men, and then everybody is captured by the real villain and we learn what the true plan is. (The remote controlled locusts are just a sidenote; the actual plan is ten times eviler, a hundred times more impractical, and involves cybernetic babies. Really.)
So what’s changed from Surakksha? The special effects are just as cheap, but much less ambitious; the car chases intercut with footage of flying toy cars are gone, so the action scenes are a bit less Bond and a bit more like what you’d expect from a Bollywood action movie of the era. I kind of missed the toy car chases. They certainly looked silly, but it was a charming sort of silly.
I’m much less ambivalent about the other major change, the portrayal of Gopi himself. In Surakksha, is shown to be a Bond-style womanizer, but one who operates within the Indian social context, so when he sings Bollywood love songs about eternal love and fidelity to Priya it comes across as sleazy. Wardat deals with the problem by telling, not showing. Everyone in the movie knows that Gopi has an eye for the ladies, but he doesn’t do much skirt-chasing onscreen; it makes a difference when we don’t see our hero waking up with a random woman in one scene, and singing love songs to the heroine the next.
The way the other characters react to Gopi has changed as well. The CBI chief (Iftekhar) was politely exasperated with Gopi’s womanizing in the first movie, but he seems actively disgusted here. Priya’s description of Gopi, as relayed by Kajal, is both unflattering and completely accurate. And this time around the romantic relationship is clearly and explicitly initiated by Kajal, while Gopi is very upfront about his history and the odds of another girl coming along. The end result is a Gopi who is still flawed, but much more likable.
It’s very easy to make fun of the Gunmaster G-9 movies, but I snark because I love. Like it’s predecessor, Wardat is deeply flawed and doesn’t make much sense, but it’s ambitious, enthusiastic, and entertaining.
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