Shaka, when the walls fell.

This is supposed to be a review of Diljale (1996), but it's Diljale (Abridged) because the cut of the movie I watched has had more than an hour trimmed off its running time.  It was a long movie before, and there's still a lot of plot left, but the climax hinges on a few crucial changes of heart which apparently took place during off screen conversations.  It certainly helps keep the pace up, though.

Army officer Ranveer (Parmeet Sethi) is exploring the countryside around his new posting (they never explicitly say which state the movie takes place in, but it it clearly and obviously Kashmir, and not just because the movie was filmed in Switzerland, a popular Kashmir-double) when he catches sight of a mysterious and beautiful woman (Sonali Bendre) walking through the woods.  He doesn't manage to catch her, but he's already in love, and he sings a song to his men about how in love he is.

Later that night Ranveer meets his father's old friend Raja Saab (Skakti Kapoor) at a party, and is introduced to Raja Saab's daughter Radhika.  Radhika is the woman he saw in the woods, and since the families know and like each other, the pair are almost immediately engaged.  It's a remarkably easy love story, but there's a twist; Radhika has a dark secret in her past that her father is desperately trying to ensure stays secret.

Just as the engagement party is about to begin, Ranveer is called away to deal with a terrorist attack, and for some strange reason Raja Saab decides to go with him.  It's a diversion, though, and after they leave the notorious terrorist Shaka (Ajay Devgn) attacks the compound and then burns down the wedding pavilion.  He exchanges portentous glances with Radhika, and then leaves.

After the attack Shaka visits his mother (Farida Jalal), and the movie switches to a long flashback to when Shaka was a carefree but deeply patriotic college student named Shyam, son of a deeply patriotic village leader (Akash Khurana.)  Shyam's good heart and overwhelming patriotism catches the attention of Radhika, who is studying at the same college, and she starts sending him anonymous love notes.  Many, many love notes.  Shyam asks Radhika to help him figure out who is sending the notes, and she thinks it's funny to pin the blame on an overweight classmate.  (It is not funny, it's cruel, and if I were in charge of cutting an hour from the movie I know exactly where I would start.)

After a lengthy song about how he's not going to fall in love with anybody, Shyam figures out that Radhika sent the notes, and promptly falls in love with her.  This should be happy news, but Raja Saab is not happy when he finds out.  Not only is Shyam of a lower social status, his father is a thorn in Raja's political side.  He frames the father for sheltering terrorists, and the army makes the man disappear.  Shyam tries to find his father and get him released, only to be disappeared as well.  Raja Saab makes sure to show up at the prison so that father and son know exactly what he did and why.  After a brutal beating Shyam's father dies, and Shyam manages to escape, finally finding shelter with avuncular terrorist leader Dara (Amrish Puri).  

Back to the present.  Ranveer vows that he will not marry until he has killed Shaka.  For his part, Shaka keeps pretending that he doesn't care about Radhika anyway and busies himself doing terrorist stuff, finally kidnapping a bus full of pilgrims to exchange for four of his recently captured comrades, and the fact that Radhika happens to be on the bus is just a coincidence.  Honest.

Shaka's partner Shabnam (Madhoo), who is not-so-secretly in love with him, wants to execute Radhika right away.  Shaka can't bring himself to hurt her, though, and he won't let anybody else hurt her either, which means they get to play mind games with one another for a while.  Meanwhile, Ranveer is tearing up the countryside looking for his missing fiance, and Dara is plotting to bring his men to "a neighboring country" where they can be trained as suicide bombers and return to destroy India from within.  (Whenever a Nineties Bollywood movie plays coy about "a neighboring country" they always mean Pakistan.)

In a lot of ways, this is all typical Nineties fare, featuring a cast doing what they usually do.  Farida Jalal is the ideal mother, Shakti Kapoor is despicable, Amrish Puri steals every scene he's in, Sonali Bendre gets to display some real spine, and Ajay Devgn stumbles through his romantic scenes as Shyam but glowers impressively as Shaka.

The treatment of the politics, though, is surprising.  Dara and his men are not two-dimensional fanatics driven by ideology, they are people with a legitimate grudge against the Indian government, which is in fact disappearing people.  It's the same period covered in Haider, Vishal Bhardwaj's adaptation of Hamlet set in the Kashmir insurgency.

Of course, there's only so much nuance you can fit into a Nineties action-romance. The movie is very clear that being a terrorist is bad, even if you have a point, and Dara and company get a comeuppance in the end, though perhaps not the comeuppance you were expecting.  (And fair enough; terrorism absolutely is bad, even if you have a point.)  If you want a thoughtful, in depth fictionalized examination of the situation in Kashmir at the time, watch Haider.  On the other hand, even with its saccharine ending and the stated moral that "love can stop terrorism," it's remarkable that this silly action movie goes as far as it does in criticizing India's handling of the conflict while the conflict was still going on.

I'm wondering if she still gets her commission.

 In Bollywood they say that romance is dead.  It's not, of course; the Hindi film industry runs in cycles, and romance will always come back, though it is true that the days in which Shah Rukh Khan stood over the subcontinent like a colossus, arms outstretched and asking a nation to look into his eyes have ended.  In any case, Bollywood is not the only game in town, and the Telugu film industry is still making movies like Shaadi Mubarak (2021).

Even though Satya (Drishya Raghunath) is the daughter of a marriage broker (Rashshri Nair), she's not particularly interested in tying the knot herself, and especially not with the college friend her mother has picked out for her.  Still, Satya likes to slip her picture into the collection of eligible brides her mother keeps in the office, just to see if anyone likes her.  (They do!)  But while Satya may be mischievous, she's still a dutiful daughter who cheerfully listens to her father's story about the baby boy born at the same hospital on the same day as her, a boy whose mother died, leaving a heartbroken husband and a valuable lesson about the power of love, even though it would be an outrageous coincidence for the boy to show up now after all these years.

On her birthday, Satya is asked to take a client to meet three potential brides.  The client is Madhav (Sagar R. K. Nadu).  When Satya asks him why he's ready to get married now, a question she asks all her clients, Madhu explains that his horoscope predicts that he will marry an older woman, and his parents insist on marrying him off right away to avoid that terrifying fate.  And in a shocking coincidence, it's also Madhav's birthday.

Madhav dutifully meets with the potential brides, but it's clear that he's more interested in Satya.  She finds him intriguing as well, and snoops through his bag when he's not looking, playfully trying on the ring she finds inside.  Naturally, it gets stuck on her finger.

Despite the mutual attraction, though, meeting other women is not a situation conducive to anything more than a little light flirting and the occasional bit of exposition.  Satya learns about the girl Madhav used to love, before her policeman father rounded him up along with his friends and had him beaten.  And in another coincidence, that girl, Bhagyamati (Aditi Myakal), is the third bride.

It must be fate, because by the end of the day Madhav has accepted Bhagyamanti, and a heartbroken Satya calls her mother and agrees to marry the man picked out for her.  Madhav tracks her down and tries to explain that he only agreed to Bhagyamanti's proposal in order to help her elope with the man she's secretly in love with, but Satya grew up in the Village of People Who Jump to Conclusions, so she assumes that he's only after his ring and refuses to listen.  

It sounds like a perfect recipe for drama, and there's certainly a fair bit of angst involved, but this is a light fluffy romance, and the problem is solved through the grand romantic tradition of separate epiphanies followed by a loud argument in the middle of someone else's wedding.

Shaadi Mubarak is not a deep film; it's the kind of earnest and goofy romantic comedy that they made in Bollywood fifteen years ago.  It's a pleasant movie about good looking people who are nice and eventually wind up together; that may sound dismissive, but being pleasant etc. is what you want out of this kind of movie.  That's its job, and it does it well.

Eventually they assemble.

Sooryavanshi (2021) is the continuation, and perhaps the culmination, of Rohit Shetty's Cop Universe.  Like the other Cop Universe movies, this is not a film about superheroes, but is still follows all the beats of a big superhero team-up movie.  It's not The Avengers, but there's still an awful lot of avenging going on.

The movie starts with a massive amount of exposition, beginning with the 1993 Mumbai bombings, though in this universe ace detective Kabir Shroff (Javed Jaffrey) solved the case in two days, arresting most of the conspirators.  One  of the ringleaders, Bilal Ahmed (Kumud Mishra) fled to Pakistan and the protection of terrorist ringleader Omar Hafeez (Jackie Shroff), who subsequently ordered the creation of a network of sleeper agents spread throughout India and overseen by Riyaz Hafeez (Abhimanyu Singh), Omar's son.

Veer Sooryavanshi (Akshay Kumar) lost both of his parents in the 1993 bombings, and so he has become a superhero maverick cop who plays by his own rules but gets results.  Sooryavanshi has  assembled a small team of loyal subordinates to help him in his rule breaking and results getting, and he repays their loyalty by consistently forgetting their names.  This is played as a humorous quirk, presumably to set Sooryavanshi apart from his fellow maverick cops, but Akshay Kumar is able to set himself apart through the power of acting.

Veer is currently separated from his wife Ria (Katrina Kaif) and son Aryan (Vidhaan Sharma) after an incident when he brought them to a car chase and shootout.  It wasn't entirely deliberate, and he had planned to have them wait in the car, but once he spotted the baddies he pursued them without dropping his family off, and Aryan was wounded.  They try to be civil, but Ria is planning to take Aryan with her to Australia, and I am on Team Ria.

Meanwhile, terrorists.  By this point Kabir Shroff is Joint Chief of Police and Sooryavanshi's boss.  The police have finally discovered Riyaz Hafeez's location, so Shroff sends Sooryavanshi to make the arrest.  After a big action scene, he succeeds, and further investigation leads them to Kader Usmani (Gulshan Grover), a pickpocket turned terrorist now posing as a Muslim religious leader.  They don't have enough evidence to charge Usmani with anything, and he's too politically connected to arrest anyway, but Sooryavanshi still insists on making a dramatic speech and threatening future arrest.

All of that is enough to make Hafeez Senior send Bilal back to India to retrieve a hidden store of highly explosive RDX, and to activate the scattered sleeper agents.  The explosives are retrieved, Riyaz is broken out of prison, and plans are made to hit Mumbai with a massive attack, including six carefully placed bombs and a direct assault on the Anti-Terrorism Squad headquarters.  

Can Sooryavanshi foil the terrorists and patch things up with his estranged wife?  Yes, but he'll need help from the other Cop Universe heroes, Simmba (Ranveer Singh) and Singham (Ajay Devgn).  And it's when the crossover starts that things begin to get really interesting, because while our three heroes are the same type of character, their respective movies fall into different subgenres, and they bring their genres with them.  Sooryavanshi is probably the most typical of the three, a cop on the edge with an estranged wife, and more often than not he wins through persistence and dangerous stunts.  He's the John McClane of the group.

Simmba is different. He's wisecracking and genre aware, like Dirty Harry as played by Bugs Bunny, and when he takes the spotlight the movie takes a sharp turn into comedy.  And Singham is a surly and hypercompetent badass; while everybody gets their share of ridiculous action movie stunts, the laws of physics seem to bend in Singham's presence.

If you like ridiculous action movies, then you are in luck.  This is a very well made ridiculous action movie.  The plot is simple but presented sincerely, and the many big action scenes are as fun as they are implausible.  (Yes, that does mean that the action scenes become more fun when Singham finally shows up.)  

However, the movie has the same problem that the other Cop Universe films share; simply put, they're cops.  They are cops who are happy to bend and break any rule that they please, up to and including torturing and summarily executing their opponents.  Because it's a movie, we know that the bad guys really are bad, but that sort of behavior would be scary when practiced by mere superpowered vigilantes.  Uniformed agents of the government taking the law into their own hands in that way is much scarier.  By all means enjoy the fun action movie, but remember that with police power there must also come police responsibility.

Going down the only road I've ever known.

Every genre has its tropes.  Karwaan (2018) is a road movie, and an arty one at that, so you can expect repressed emotions, at least one free spirit, unfortunate misunderstandings, misplaced luggage, and maybe some gangsters.  As always, everything depends on the execution.

Avinash (Dulquer Salman) is an IT worker in Bangalore with a tedious job and an abusive, incompetent boss. Avi has a real passion for photography, but he gave it up and took the terrible job after an argument with his now estranged father (Akash Khurana).  Still, when the new guy at work asks Avi if he likes the job, he tells him he's made his peace with it.  It's certainly a very simple life; Avi works, he goes home, and he totally fails to flirt with his attractive neighbor.

One night Avi gets a phone call from a travel agency.  The nice but busy lady on the phone tells him that his father has died while on a pilgrimage, and  he can pick the body up at the airport.  She hangs up before Avi can ask any of his many follow up questions, so Avi has to turn to his friend Shaukat (Irrfan Khan) for help; Shaukat is eccentric but loyal, and more important, he has a van.

After some bureaucratic nonsense Avi retrieves the body and makes arrangements for its cremation.  Just before that can happen, though, Shaukat looks in the coffin and discovers that they have the wrong body; it's somebody's mother rather than Avi's father.

After some investigation, Avi is contacted by a widowed hotel owner named Tahira (Amala Akkeneni), and she tells him that she has his father's body and would very much like her mother's body back, please.  Tahira lives in faraway Kochi, and at first the plan is for them to meet halfway, but Avi is hopelessly nice and soon he and Shaukat agree to make the entire journey.

But it's a road movie, so of course there are a number of distractions and sidequests, most importantly collecting Tahira's daughter Tanya (Mithila Palkar) from her college in Ooty.  And tanya completes the road movie ensemble, giving the film three strongly contrasting personalities to bounce off one another.  Tanya is a sullen teen with a keen eye for social dynamics and a need for a bit of structure and boundaries in her life, Shaukat is both an eccentric with the heart of a poet and a devout and conservative Muslim, while Avi is painfully nice but can't bring himself to stand up for what he really wants.  Everybody has a lesson to be learned, and they're all ideally positioned to help one another.

There's nothing really innovative or surprising about Karwaan; the meanderings of the plot are entertaining but fairly predictable.  However, the three leads are quirky and interesting characters played by a trio of actors who excel at quirky and interesting, especially Irrfan Khan who is amazing in everything.  Everything depends on the execution, and in this case the execution is warm and comforting, like a cinematic hug.