Friendly appearance by Florida Man.

 Bollywood has a knack for sudden genre shifts, but A Gentleman (2017) is the only case I can think of where an action comedy suddenly transforms into a different action comedy.  That twist is the bit I find interesting, so naturally I am going to spoil it.

Gaurav Kapoor (Siddharth Malhotra) is a salesman at a software firm in Miami.  His best friend Dixit (Hussain Dalal) accuses him of living his life in reverse - he's got a good job, a nice house in the  suburbs, and a safe and reliable minivan, but he doesn't have a wife to share it with, let alone the four children he's hoping for.  And fair enough!  Gaurav does have his eye on his beautiful but shallow coworker Kavya (Jacqueline Fernandez), but while she's noticed that he's a good looking guy, she thinks he's a bit too safe.  Still, Gaurav is content - Dixit calls him "the happiest sad person I've ever met."

Gaurav has reluctantly agreed to travel to Mumbai for work.  As Kavya drives him to the airport, he's about to tell her something significant, but instead he promises to tell her when he gets back.

Meanwhile Rishi (also Siddarth Malhotra) is a spy working for Unit X, a clandestine organization headed by Colonel Vijay Saxena (Suniel Shetty).  Rishi is not happy, since the other members of his unit, and especially Yakub (Darshan Kumaar) are a little too comfortable with civilian casualties.  When Yakub shoots a man who caught a glimpse of the group after a disastrous mission in Bangkok, Rishi leaves.

The Colonel makes a half-hearted assassination attempt just to get Rishi's attention, then makes him an offer - one last job, and he's free.  All he has to do is intercept a hard drive being delivered to a government official in Mumbai by a guy named Gaurav Kapoor.

This is a perfect setup for a classic mistaken identity comedy, with the two men switching lives, learning valuable life lessons, successfully wooing each other's love interests, and possibly discovering that they're actually long lost twins who were separated during a childhood visit to the fun fair.  But it's a trick - the two plotlines are actually set five years apart, and the real Gaurav is a) played by Kunal Sharma, and b) dead.  This is really Bollywood Grosse Pointe Blank, with a (sort of) reformed assassin trying to live an ordinary life only to discover that he can't outrun his past and he's going to have to outshoot it.  

I'm not sure that this is a deliberate take on Grosse Pointe Blank, and it's certainly not any sort of officially sanctioned remake, but it does hit a lot of the same beats.  It's a black comedy punctuated with light romance and a number of action scenes set in unlikely environments, in this case including a duct tape battle in Home Depot, a martial arts fight in a laundromat, and a whole lot of gunplay in Gaurav's lovely home.

Sidharth Malhotra is often typecast as the earnest, sensible guy who can be counted on to do the right thing, and that's what really makes A Gentleman work. Rishi isn't pretending to be the cheerful stick in the mud and aspiring family man who carefully drives the speed limit and insists on coasters when his guests have a drink; actual Gaurav isn't like that at all, it's just Rishi living his best life.  Sure, it takes being revealed as a killer on the run to get Kavya to take a second look at him, but it's being a grownup that makes the relationship interesting.

Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse.

 Shahid Kapoor is a fine actor, and probably my favorite cinematic Hamlet.  He didn't spring into being as a full fledged respected thespian, though - Kapoor's first film appearance was as a background dancer, and he's had a complicated career.  For every Jab We Met there's been a Fool N Final, for every Fida there's been a Dora and Diego's 4-D Adventure Catch That Robot Butterfly (no, I am not kidding) and for every Haider there has been a Phata Poster Nikhla Hero (2013.)

Usually when a movie starts with its aspiring actor hero making a dramatic entrance and beating up a large crowd of violent criminals, it's a dream, and probably a dream about a film shoot.  Vishwas Rao (Shahid Kapoor), on the other hand, actually beats people up.  He's a natural action hero, because his mother Savitri (Padmini Kolhapure) has always dreamed of her son becoming a policeman, and when he was a child she made sure he was trained in martial arts specifically so that he could fight large groups of attackers.  

Savitri is a rickshaw driver who respects the law and has a powerful sense of justice, stemming form her tragic backstory involving Yashwanth (Mukesh Tiwari), who was her husband, Vishwas's father, and a spectacularly corrupt policeman who apparently died while fleeing angry villagers.  This will be important later.

Vishwas adores his mother, but he's an aspiring actor, not an aspiring policeman, and he deliberately blows every interview Savitri arranges.  Finally she pulls some strings and arranges for an interview in Mumbai, and Vishwas agrees to go because it's Mumbai, center of the film industry.

 

Once in town Vishwas meets Guruji (Sanjay Mishra), an unsuccessful writer with connections to the industry.  Guruji sends him to get some proper pictures taken, and a chain of farcical events leads to Vishwas riding home on a borrowed scooter while wearing a borrowed police uniform.  That's when he meets Kajal (Ileana D'Cruz), a social worker known to the police as "Complaint Kajal" for her annoying tendency to notice crimes and ask them to do something about it.  Kajal has spotted a kidnapping, and she spots Vishwas just in time and sends him in hot pursuit.  The crooks are confused because they've paid off Inspector Ghorpande (Zakir Hussein), so the police should be leaving them alone.  Vishwas arrives at the right time, and when the crooks try to drive him off, he beats them all up, saving the kidnapped girl in the process.

Vishwas and Kajal keep meeting by accident, and she keeps dragging him off to stop crimes in progress.  Thanks to his fighting skills and flair for the dramatic, Vishwas becomes a highly successful accidental vigilante, leading crimelord Gundappa (Saurabh Shukla) to demand that Ghorpande find this mysterious and effective new policeman before the enigmatic international criminal mastermind Napoleon (he's the Moriarty of Crime!) arrives to begin Operation White Elephant.

That's not nearly complicated enough, though, so the Joint Commissioner of Police Shivanand Khare (Darshan Jariwala), who is not corrupt, also wants to find the strangely effective newcomer.  And after spotting a picture of Vishwas in uniform in the newspaper, Savitri insists on coming to Mumbai to see him work, so Guruji and a few other friends borrow a scheme from Munnabhai, M.B.B.S. (deliberately - Vishwas specifically mentions the movie) and put up an elaborate front to fool her into thinking that her son really is a police officer.  It only has to last for three days, so what could go wrong?

The charade falls apart almost as completely as Munna's fake hospital did.  When she discovers the truth, Savitri confronts her wayward son and then collapses from Sudden Onset Bollywood Mystery Disease.  The doctor tells Vishwas that she will need an operation, and he'd better be prepared to pay one million rupees, or his mother will die.  And that's when Gundappa appears with a simple offer - he'll pay for the operation if Vishwas will retrieve a CD with a secret message from Napoleon from onstage at a dance festival.  

After the obligatory dance number, Vishwas retrieves the CD, then Khare's honest police appear and try to get their hands on it.  In the ensuing scuffle, two policemen are shot dead, leaving Vishwas a wanted man with no apparent choice but to join Gundappa's gang.  Of course, not everything is as it appears . . .

Phata Poster Nikhla Hero is a spoof of nineties Bollwood action comedies, and it's quite open about it.  Vishwas points out the plotpoints lifted from Munnabhai and Amitabh Bachchan's Don, and at the end of the movie he ticks off all the filmi tropes he's lived through.  However, a good spoof is an example of the thing it's spoofing, and this is a good spoof.  (Also, those movies were pretty silly to begin with.)  The movie follows established tropes, but it commits tot hem, and it executes them well.

The supporting cast is good - Shukla has an air of affable menace, Kolhapure is an excellent filmi mom and adds a hefty dose of melodrama to everything she says, and D'Cruz gives a very Juhi Chawla role her own spin.  But this is absolutely Shahid Kapoor's movie.  He's got all the charm and filial piety you'd expect from the hero of one of these movies, but between the dramatic plot twists and the fact that Vishwas is an actor, Kapoor manages to display a surprising amount of range for such a light and fluffy part.  It's no Hamlet, but it wasn't meant to be.

How to win friends and punch people.

Dishoom (2016) is not a movie with pretensions.  It knows exactly what it wants to be: a bombastic summer action flick with maverick cops, sports, jokes, a pretty girl, and no deeper emotional complexity than the enduring and eternal bond between buddies.  Spoiler: that's exactly what Dishoom is.

During a cricket tournament in Abu Dabi, Indian cricket superstar Viraj Sharma (Saqib Saleem) has gone missing.  Soon after a hostage video surfaces, apparently from a deranged, self proclaimed Pakistan fan (Faisal Rashid) who demands that the tournament be played without Viraj.  The local police keep Viraj's disappearance quiet, and the Indian government insists on sending one of their best, Kabir Shergill (John Abraham), to help with the case.

Kabir is a maverick cop who plays by his own rules, by which I mean that he's an arrogant jerk who is introduced beating up the guy who asked him not to smoke in the elevator.  Almost immediately after landing in Abu Dabi, he pulls a gun on a police officer and demands to be taken to the Indian team's hotel rather than the police station.

Miraculously, Kabir is not thrown in jail, or even taken off the case.  Instead, he is partnered with rookie cop Junaid Ansari (Varun Dhawan).  Junaid's main qualification is that he knows every street in the city, thanks to a year spent fruitlessly searching for a  missing dog.  (The dog turns out to be very important later.)  With the help of sexy pickpocket Ishika (Jacqueline Fernandez) they track down the psychotic superfan only to discover that he's a struggling actor who thought he was auditioning for a role.

Cut to the real villain, sports bookie Wagah (Akshaye Khana), who is tired of Viraj's miraculous last minute cricket wins.  Wagah also would like to make a great deal of money.  He tries bribing Viraj, but the cricket star is a patriot, and he will not betray his country, either for money or to save his own life.  Wagah orders his henchman Altaf (Rahul Dev) to store Viraj in nearby Abbudin.

Meanwhile, Kabir has finally been thrown off the case; he's a loose cannon who plays by his own rules, but so far he has not been getting results.  Junaid hands in his badge, and the pair break Ishika out of jail to help them get into Abbudin, where they an underground arm-wrestling ring which uses captive women as currency.  This leads to a big musical number.

Dishoom is probably most successful when it's a bromantic comedy.  Abraham and Dhawan have an easy chemistry, and the two characters do seem to bring out the best in each other, relatively speaking; Junaid softens some of Kabir's rough edges, while Kabir gives Junaid the respect that he needs.  I don't particularly like either character, but I believe that they like one another.

The romantic tracks are less successful.  Ishika clearly likes Kabir, but the characters barely interact at all, while Junaid keeps receiving unsolicited calls from Qureshi (Satish Kaushik) to tell him that the entire family saw Junaid's matrimonial ad and they didn't like the looks of him.  I will never say no to a Parineeti Chopra cameo, but it takes  along and not very funny brick joke to get her there.

The movie's real hero is Viraj, who suffers his captivity with dignity, holds firm to his ideals, and never points a gun at anyone over a trivial dispute. Unfortunately, he doesn't get a lot of screentime, but most of his screentime is shared with Akshaye Khanna, the cast's real standout.  I still think of Khanna as the gentle Sid from Dil Chahta Hai, but he's clearly having a wonderful time chewing the scenery and carrying out an evil scheme which doesn't make a whole lot of sense.  

While Dishoom is mostly successful as a dumb action movie (it's dumb, and there is action) the movie keeps threatening to deal with serious issues, and then not following through.  The arm wrestling sequence and accompanying musical number are probably the worst example.  There's a harrowing moment when Kabir and Junaid catch sight of the captive women who are explicitly being offered as prizes, with one of the women silently begging for help.  They can't help yet (because secret mission) and it's Ishika doing the dancing for reasons that are never explained, and after the dance number and ensuing motorcycle chase the women are never mentioned again; instead we get a long sequence of Junaid repeatedly being hit in the crotch by flags.  It's a sour note in an otherwise silly movie.

The last rose of summer.

The plot of Doob: No Bed of Roses (2017) is remarkably straightforward.  Film director Javed Hasan (Irrfan Khan) is apparently happily married to Maya (Rokeya Prachy).  In a moment of weakness he has a brief affair with a much younger actress named Nitu (Parno Mitra.)  Nitu is not just young enough to be Javed's daughter, she is a childhood friend of his actual daughter Saberi (Tisha.)  And that's it.  That's the plot.  One bad decision causes everybody's lives to unravel.

The film jumps back and forth through time, starting with the events surrounding Javed eloping with Maya (who was also too young for him when the relationship started.)  There are scenes of Nitu and Saberi at school, scenes of Javed's happy life with his family, and scenes of Maya, Saberi and little brother Ahir (Rashad Hossain) trying to put their lives back together, while Javed drifts into an uncomfortable marriage with Nitu.  The film is bookended by scenes of Saberi and Nitu at their unbelievably awkward high school reunion.

This is not a movie in which things happen, in other words.  It's a movie in which one thing happened, and people stand around and talk and talk and talk about the ramifications of that one thing.  It's very much an art film, and it is slow and solemn and moves from feeling a bit like a stage play to feeling exactly like a stage play.

That's not necessarily a bad thing, though, because this movie stars Irrfan Khan, who can make "slow and solemn and stagey" incredibly compelling, especially when he's supported by a strong cast.  It's the kind of movie that relies on moments, and the moments are very good indeed.  There's an especially haunting and nearly silent scene in which Saberi offers her newly estranged father a glass of water; it should be nothing, but instead it's one last moment of connection before everything collapses, and they both know that.  It takes a lot of confidence to devote that much screentime to drinking a glass of water, but it pays off.