Bank Chor (2017) is, as the title implies, a movie about a bank robber, Champak (Riteish Deshmukh), an ordinary man forced into a life of crime, and his two Delhi-born accomplices, Gulab (Bhuvan Arora) and Genda (Vikram Thapa). They have a plan, a gun, and cunning disguises. Unfortunately, they are also idiots, and things immediately spiral out of control, leaving them with twenty eight hostages (with varying degrees of wackiness), a media circus outside the bank lfeaturing beautiful rookie reporter Gayatri Ganguli (Rhea Chakraborty), and a police operation which has been taken over by CBI officer Amjad Khan (Vivek Oberoi), a man who likes to shoot first and ask questions later, questions which mostly involve more shooting.
And at this point I was left wondering what on Earth I could say about the movie; if you've seen one wacky crime farce, you've pretty much seen them all, so you may as well sit back and wait for the climactic chase scene. But it turns out that Bank Chor is not a wacky crime farce, it's a gritty neo-noir crime drama involving a corrupt politician (Upendra Limaye) and an actual bank robber (Sahil Vaid) who is happy to kill everybody if it gets him what he wants. Our heroes just happen to be in the wrong movie, still cracking jokes and bumbling around while the universe around them plays it completely straight.
And even after the big twist, I still don't have a whole lot to say about Bank Chor. It plays fair; all the movie's twists, including the big one and the other big one, make sense based on what has come before. It's a rare example of a successful cinematic bait and switch.
No comments:
Post a Comment