Sweet, sweet subtitles

Tonight’s Bollywood feature was Soldier, not to be confused with the Kurt Russel sci-fi flick of the same name. This Soldier is 100% Indian, and there’s nary a garbage planet in sight. Instead, we have an old-fashioned revenge melodrama; three Indian military officers betray their country by raiding their own supply trucks at the behest of the mysterious D.K. After the heroic Major Malhotra discovers their treachery, they kill him. Eventually. (Malhotra manages to kick all three of their asses simultaneously, until D.K. shows up to finish them off.) Twenty years later, the three are successful arms dealers living in Australia, and wackiness ensues when a Mysterious Stranger (played by Indian action star Bobby Deol) enters their lives.

At this point, if you’ve ever seen an action movie in your life, you can pretty much guess what happens. The villains get their just deserts, the hero gets the girl (of course there’s a girl. I’ll get to her later.) With this sort of movie, what happens isn’t as important as how it happens, and there’s a certain fascination in watching Vicky (short for Vikram), the aforementioned Mysterious Stranger, worm his way into the lives of his targets. Plus, there’s singing, dancing, a shark attack, divine intervention, ninjas on horseback, and remarkably unconvincing fake vultures.

Speaking of the vultures, let me take a moment to talk about the Indian film censors. Long time Bollywood viewers know that kissing is very, very rare in Bollywood. To quote from the Bollywhat FAQ on the subject,

The censor board is notoriously unpredictable; no one wants to risk getting a rating that would scare away families. Also, Bollywood plays to a diverse range of people, from the illiterate and provincial to the worldly and urban. Ideas of morality differ widely from group to group. Why include a kiss when you can easily leave it out and avoid the risk of offending customers? Also, actresses don’t want to lose their conservative fans, nor do they want to endure salacious flak from journalists. So they’re not too keen on kissing on-screen, and many proudly trumpet their refusal to do it.

Soldier actually does feature an onscreen kiss, but it’s a kiss between two Australians, rather than our hero and heroine. In fact, the kiss inspires a long, rambling digression about what people do with their noses; the hero and heroine don’t know, and nor do any of the Indian passersby they ask. This movie features two men being eaten alive by fake vultures, but clearly kissing is right out.
As I mentioned earlier, there’s a girl. Not just any girl, mind you; it’s my personal favorite Bollywood actress, Preity Zinta, playing the daughter of one of the three villains. This was one of Preity’s first movies (she’s so new, they don’t even bother to give her character a different name; everybody just calls her Preity), and it’s clearly not her film. She has some nice comic material early on, though, and displays a little bit of the unrelenting charm that made her the star she is today.
Two final notes -

1) I had planned to start this mini-review thingie by saying that the movie in no way reminded me of Shakespeare. Unfortunately, that’s not true. The ubiquitous Johnny Lever shows up in a throwaway comic relief role as a man searching for his long lost twin, which is about as Shakespearean as one can get without speaking in blank verse. The payoff to this gag comes at the very end of the film, and it’s fairly subtle, especially for a gag involving Johnny Lever.

2) An addendum to the Evil Overlord List: “If I find myself in an Indian movie, I will not under any circumstances harm or allow any harm to come to the hero’s mother. They hate that.”