Madam, my heart is yours sincerely.

Quick Gun Murugun: Misadventures of an Indian Cowboy (2009) is the most action-packed movie about vegetarianism I've ever seen. Murugun (Doctor Rajendra Prasad) is, as advertised, a cowboy, which means he considers it his sacred duty to protect cows, especially from the people who want to eat them. (This is India, after all.) Murugun wanders the dusty plains of South India in the 1980's, accompanied only by his horse and his Locket Lover (Anu Menon), the image of his deceased sweetie who still speaks to him, mostly to nag him about getting a steady job, maybe something in IT? In the course of his wandering and gunslinging, Murugun runs afoul of Rice Plate Reddy, a gangster who plots to force all the local hotels to stop serving vegetables and instead serve beef. After a Crouching Tiger-inspired ambush in a coconut forest, Murugun is captured and delivered to Reddy, who defies centuries of villainous tradition and just shoots the hero while he has the chance. RIP Quick Gun.

As soon as he reaches Heaven, Quick Gun files the proper paperwork to be sent back to Earth. Unfortunately, the wheels of bureaucracy turn slowly, and he's sent back to Mumbai in the twenty first century. Locket Lover thinks this is the perfect opportunity to get a job selling kerosene, but instead he reunites with his older brother and sister-in-law, then sets out to track down Reddy, who has become a business tycoon and is about to launch McDosas, a chain restaurant with an all-meat menu. He also meets the lovely Mango Dolly (Rambha), a bar singer and Reddy's secret girlfriend.

What follows is a dizzying array of explosions, kidnapped housewives, and completely improbably gunfights. The special effects are, frankly, a bit on the cheap side, but it's all a part of the fun. Despite the computer-aided supernatural gunslinging, though, I think the closest comparison I could make is to Adam West's Batman; Quick Gun Murugun is a portly middle aged man in a technicolor cowboy outfit who wanders through one ridiculous situation after another, but he's also a fearless hero with a kind heart and a natural poetry to his dialogue, and the movie never loses sight of that.

"The Earth is my bed. The sky is my ceiling. The whole of creation is my native place. My name is Murugun. Quick Gun Murugun. Mind it!"