Thursday, September 26, 2019

My Father the Car

Taarzan the Wonder Car (2004) is a Bollywood revenge melodrama with a twist; the villainous conspirators are being hunted and killed, but not by Bobby Deol. By a car. A wonder car. Named Taarzan.

Devesh (Ajay Devgan) is the designer of a new supercar. He takes the design to a local company, but they can’t agree on terms. When he tries to take the design to someone else, they steal it and patent it for themselves, and then, when Devesh threatens to expose their operation, the kill him and dump his body (and car) into a nearby lake. (Note to self - never deal with any company that has Shakti Kapoor on the board.)

Devesh leaves behind a mother (the ever wonderful Farida Jalal) and a son, Raj (Vatsal Sheth). Raj grows into a nerdy but good-hearted young man. Raj goes to college, where he’s regularly harassed by thugs, and works part time at a garage run by the kindly Kartar Singh (Amrish Puri with a big bushy beard.)

Raj’s life changes when he meets Priya (Ayesha Takia), who has just transferred in from Oxford University (in London, as usual). He quickly falls for her, and for reasons that are never quite explained, Priya falls for him as well. And on the way home after visiting Priya, he spots a familiar shape in the scrapyard - his father’s old car! (Which he recognizes because of the Tarzan figurine dangling from the rear view mirror.)

Working obsessively, Raj restores the car and transforms it into a nifty looking sports car. The car soon displays a mind of its own, and Devesh’s killers begin dying one by one.

And that’s the plot in a nutshell. Taarzan stumbles across one of Devesh’s killers, tracks him down (always at a time when Raj has an alibi), and kills him in a novel fashion, or at least as novel a fashion as is possible for a car; when you don’t have hands, your range of killing techniques is limited. This isn’t a horror movie, though, and Taarzan is not some automotive maniac; Taarzan kills only for justice, and is careful not to harm innocents. In fact, one of the villains realizes this, and manages to escape from the car (temporarily) by hiding behind a small child.

With a main plot this straightforward, the running time has to be filled out somehow. In Taarzan’s case, it’s the romance of Raj and Priya. This is unfortunate, since while the romantic sub-plot takes up a lot of time, very little actually happens; Raj and Priya meet, they tangle with the bullies, they fall in love, and everybody’s happy. There’s almost no conflict at all. Now with the right cast and the right script, conflict free romance can work well; Hum Aapke Hain Koun pulled it off beautifully. However, Raj and Priya are a pair of attractive but ultimately bland people, and the dialogue in their love scenes is often laughable. Naturally, as anyone who’s ever seen one of these Bollywood revenge flicks has already guessed, Priya’s father turns out to be one of the evil businessmen, but nobody discovers the connection until it’s far too late for the revelation to have any impact on the film; Priya doesn’t even get a tearful moment to struggle with divided loyalties.

However, nobody watches Taarzan the Wonder Car for the romance, they watch it for the car. And it is indeed a very cool car, and the stunts are often neat and only occasionally silly. This is a fun movie. It’s not deep or smart or terribly emotionally engaging, it’s just a gleeful little film about a killer car rampaging through India FOR JUSTICE!

No comments:

Post a Comment