The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Scrooge McDuck

Vishal Bhardwaj, writer-director of Matru Ki Bijlee Ka Mandola (2013), is perhaps best known for his trilogy of Shakespeare adaptations, Maqbool, Omkara, and Haider, as well as the absurdist psychological horror film No Smoking and the children's films Makdee and The Blue Umbrella.  That means he's responsible for some of my favorite movies, as well as Rangoon.  It also means that he has a very distinctive and quirky style, so even an ordinary plot about star-crossed lovers can go to some strange places.

The Mandola of the title is Harry Mandola (Pankaj Kapoor), a wealthy landowner with a drinking problem.  It's not that he's a mean drunk.  Quite the reverse, really; Drunk Harry is dangerously irresponsible but also charming and deeply sympathetic to the local farmers, who are being exploited by Sober Harry, who is ruthless and only cares about his ambitions and his daughter Bijlee (Anushka Sharma).

Bijlee is a lot like your typical Bollywood heroine at the start of the movie; she's young and carefree and nothing will ever change her.  She has a lot more tattoos than the average Bollywood heroine, though, and she knows exactly what she wants.  Bijlee plans to marry her college friend Baadal (Arya Babaar).  It's a love match rather than an arranged marriage, but it still suits Sober Harry, since Baadal is the son of the spectacularly corrupt politician Chaudary Devi (art film superstar Shabana Azmi), who is Harry's partner in an upcoming land deal and also his secret girlfriend.

Drunk Harry, on the other hand, recognizes that Baadal is an idiot, and wants Bijlee to marry Matru (Imran Khan.).  Matru is officially Harry's driver, but his real job is to keep Harry out of trouble, and especially to keep Harry from drinking more than four drinks in a night.  Matru is really bad at that part of his job, but he is an effective sidekick for Drunk Harry, and he is quite good at getting Harry out of trouble, even when he leads the local farmers in a protest against himself.

That's the romantic track, but it's not the whole story.  The village of Mandola (named after Harry's family) has fallen on hard times after several years of crop failures, and all of the local farms are heavily mortgaged.  Harry wants to buy up the land and have the area declared a Special Economic Zone, which will enable him to build the factories and shopping malls of his dreams, and Chaudhary Devi wants to use the deal to further her political career, and wants Baadal to marry Bijlee in order to gain control of Harry's money.  Harry and Chaudhary Devi both get Shakespearean soliloquies to explain their motives, but Baadal does not, and has to settle for bragging about the evil plan to his very much not on board fiance..  

The villagers haven't given up, though, and they receive mysterious letters providing both hope and practical advice from someone calling himself Mao.  Mao's identity is a carefully guarded secret . . . for the characters, that is, because it's almost immediately obvious to the audience that Mao is Matru, who trained as a lawyer before becoming Harry's driver, and who spends a lot of time talking about how the land should belong to the people who work on it.

But wait, there's still more plot!  In order for the evil scheme to succeed, Harry has to stay sober.  The trouble is, if he goes for too long without a drink, he starts to hallucinate, seeing the pink buffalo from the label of his favorite brand.  It also quickly becomes apparent that the only person who can stop Sober Harry is Drunk Harry, which means that Matru is going to need a lot of pink paint.

The film has to walk a fine line with the Drunk Harry/Sober Harry dichotomy, and I think they're mostly successful.  Drunk Harry is dangerous, breaking buildings and cars and airplanes, and causing chaos wherever he goes.  he's nicer than Sober Harry, but he's not reliable.  Drunk Harry is an outlet for Harry's neglected conscience, but he's not a viable long term solution, and the movie does recognize that.

Beyond that . . . well, this is a weird movie, but it's a weird movie with tremendous style, an unassuming romantic comedy with the rhythms of a Shakespearean tragedy, a focus on the stern parent rather than the young lovers, and an invisible pink buffalo.

Spy Month: Pathaan

Pathaan (2023) is a movie with a lot to accomplish.  It needs to reboot the acting career of Shah Rukh Khan after the spectacular failure of Zero.  It needs to establish Yash Raj Films' Spy Universe as an actual cinematic universe, rather than a succession of mostly unrelated action movies that happen to involve spies.  And it needs to tell an entertaining story that stands on its own.  Making lots of money would also be nice.

Khan plays Pathaan,a farmer RAW agent with a complicated backstory.  The short version is that he was abandoned in front of a movie theater as a baby, raised in a series of government orphanages, joined RAW in order to repay his country, and was badly wounded on his first mission in Afghanistan while saving a  school full of children.  While recovering, he was basically adopted by the local Pashtun (also known as Pathan) villagers, who named him Pathaan.  (Nobody ever calls him anything but Pathaan, so there's no way to know what his name used to be.)

Pathaan is discharged because of his injuries, but he's not ready to quit just yet.  With the help of his mentor, Nandini Grewal (Dimple Kapadia), and the reluctant approval of Colonel Luthra (Ashutosh Rana, last seen in War) Pathaan founds JOCR, the Joint Operations and Covert Research department, which provides a way for other wounded and traumatized former RAW agents to continue to serve their country.

JOCR's first mission takes them to Dubai, to foil an attempted attack on India's president by "Outfit X," a mercenary terrorist organization headed by another former RAW agent named Jim (John Abraham.)  Jim might not have a very intimidating name, but he's charismatic, driven, and very smart; Luthra says that he's as good as Kabir, just to make it absolutely clear that this movie is taking place in the same universe as War.

Jim is also not actually after the President.  It's a feint, to get RAW to pull security away from two scientists whoa re attending the same Dubai conference. Pathaan figures it out, but despite a long fight scene, he's only able to save one of them and Jim gets away with the other.  

JOCR follows the money, and the trail leads to a Pakistani doctor named Rubai Mohsin (Deepika Padukone), who lives in London but is currently in Spain.  Pathaan follows, and after a musical number in which Padukone rotates through a plethora of bikinis, he falls right into the obvious trap.  Rubai is working for Jim!  Or is she?  After Jim leaves, she saves Pathaan and reveals that she's an undercover ISI agent, there to stop Jim from obtaining something called "Raktbeej."

Raktbeej is kept in a locked vault in Moscow.  Rathaan and Rubai make a plan to steal it before Jim can get his hands on it.  They succeed, and then Pathaan falls into the other obvious trap: Rubai was working for Jim after all!  She takes Raktbeej, and Pathaan is arrested and placed on a train transporting prisoners to, presumably, Siberia.  But he escapes thanks to the timely appearance of Tiger (Salman Khan), who is, and I cannot stress this enough, alive. 

And that's just the flashbacks.  In the present Pathaan reunites with Nandini and the rest of RAW to track down Jim and prevent a devastating attack on a major Indian city.  And hey, there's Rubai, offering to help.  We can trust her this time, right?

Pathaan stars Action Shah Rukh, rather than Goofy Romantic Comedy Shah Rukh or Emotional Family Drama Shah Rukh, but Pathaan (the character) is a relatively well-adjusted guy rather than a snarling ball of violence like Don.  The movie is a decent sampler of the Shah Rukh Khan Experience; Pathaan fights like an SRK character, getting beaten up until he manages to win the fight by refusing to stay down.  His scenes with Tiger show great comic chemistry, and his scenes with Rubina show a bit of his old bumbling charm, filtered through genre and maturity.

Pathaan also firmly establishes the Spy Universe as a thing.  It's not just the Tiger cameo and Luthra referencing characters and events form the other movies, the movies share a common subtext about the need for human connection; Tiger only lives for his work until he's transformed by meeting Zoya (and vice versa), in War Naina urges Kabir to find a connection because "every soldier needs someone to come home to," and it's the loss of connection that starts Jim down his dark path, while Pathaan forges connections everywhere he goes.  Paathan and Nandini talk a lot about the Japanese tradition of  Kintsugi, repairing broken porcelain with gold to produce something new and beautiful rather than pretending that the break didn't happen.  It's a remarkable philosophy for an action hero.

Which leaves one question.  Is Pathaan an entertaining story that stands on its own?  A newcomer isn't going to know who this Kabir guy Luthra keeps mentioning is, but otherwise it stands alone.  Entertaining?  Tastes vary.  The pacing's a little wonky, with fight scenes that last a long time, and the plotting gets sloppy, but it's a masala picture.  There are songs and fights and motorcycles driving across the ice for no good reason and a jetpack dogfight.  I'm not complaining.

Spy Month: War

War (2019) isn't just a big budget spy movie with improbable gadgets and even more improbable action scenes in exotic locations, it's also an inter-generational Bollywood bromance, bringing together Hrithik Roshan and Tiger Shroff for a long awaited dance off.  Plus all the action, I guess.

Roshan plays veteran RAW agent Kabir Dhaliwal.  Kabir has gone rogue, assassinating his handler in Delhi when he was supposed to be overseas assassinating a terrorist leader.  Kabir was a highly placed agent, and if he's switched sides, India's entire intelligence community is in danger.  He needs to be stopped, and Colonel Luthra (Ashutosh Rana) knows just the man to do it: Kabir's protege Khalid (Tiger Shroff).  

Luthra promptly gathers his team to hunt down Kabir and puts some other guy in charge, worrying that Khalid won't be able to kill his mentor.  This gives Khalid time for a flashback about his struggle to join Kabir's elite team, a struggle complicated by the fact that Khalid's father was a traitor, eventually killed by Kabir.  Still, Khalid gets his chance, and during a mission to Iraq he proves himself.  Kabir accepts him as a loyal team member, and there's the aforementioned big dance number.

Kabir's target is businessman, arms dealer and terrorist (he's a busy guy) Rizwan Ilyasi (Sanjeev Vatsa). He's finally tracked Ilyasi to Morocco, and the team moves in.  Unfortunately, one of the team (Yash Raaj Singh) is a mole, and the resulting gunfight leaves most of the team dead, and both Kabir and Khalid seriously wounded.

Back in the present, Kabir kills an Air Force Colonel in spectacular fashion, destroying two planes and a jeep in the process.  It's clear that he's working his way down a list of targets.  He still has time to pop up and taunt Khalid, supervillain style, and Khalid is desperately trying to figure out a motive.  the answers can only be found in another extended flashback about Kabir's last mission in Italy, a mission involving Ilyasi's associate Firoze Contractor (Mashmoor Amrohi) and plucky single mom Naina (Vaani Kapoor.)  

War is a spy movie, which means that things aren't always what they first appear to be.  That's true of the plot and it's also true of the movie itself, which starts with fairly grounded espionage action and ends with missiles, spy satellites, and Kabir and Khalid crashing their sports cars into a ruined cathedral that is located somewhere in the Arctic Circle for a final martial arts fight.

Despite the escalating action scenes, though, the movie is very tightly focused on the relationship between Kabir and Khalid.  There are women in the movie, and they're important; Naina's role is short but meaningful, team member Aditi (Anupriya Goenka) is the single most competent character in the Spy Universe so far, and evil plastic surgeon Mallika (Dipannita Sharma) enables some key twists, but there are no love interests to come between the guys, and when Kabir makes his glamorous entrance, it's Khalid who watches awestruck.  

And that leads to one of the movie's problems.  Hrithik Roshan has put in some terrible performances over the years (looking at you, Main Prem Ki Diwani Hoon) but he has evolved as an actor.  Tiger Shroff is a great dancer and a skilled action star, but Roshan has a decade and a half of experience on him.  The dance off is close, but the clash of personalities is not.

Spy Month: Tiger Zinda Hai

 As the title of Tiger Zinda Hai (2017) says, Tiger is alive.  Which is not really a surprise; both Tiger (Salman Khan) and Zoya (Katrina Kaif), the Pakistani agent he fell in love with, were perfectly fine at the end of Ek Tha Tiger.  However, it turns out that Tiger's mentor and former boss Shenoy (Girish Karnad) reported him dead at the end of the disastrous confrontation in Havana, purely so that other characters could be surprised when he tells them that Tiger is alive.

And Shenoy needs Tiger.  In Iraq, notorious terrorist leader Abu Usman (Sajjad Delafrooz) was wounded ina clash with the Iraqi military.  He was brought to the local hospital, which his men promptly took over, taking twenty five Indian nurses and fifteen Pakistani nurses hostage.  The Americans see this as an opportunity, and are preparing to flatten the hospital with an airstrike.  Shenoy convinces them to give him a week to rescue the Indian hostages, but there's only one man who could succeed at such a mission, and that's Tiger.  Who is, as previously mentioned, alive.

Tiger and Zoya are currently living in the Austrian Alps with their young son Junior (Sartaaj Kakkar.)  Since they are still movie spies, they each get an action scene to reintroduce themselves to the audience: Tiger saves Junior from a pack of unrealistically aggressive wolves, a task which involves a great deal of snowboarding, while Zoya beats up a gang of thugs trying to rob a convenience store, and she does it without being seen by the security camera, because Zoya remembers how they got caught in Havana.

Shenoy arrives and makes his pitch.  Zoya tells Tiger that he should go, because Tiger has always loved his duty even more than he loves her, which is not the way I remember Ek Tha Tiger, but whatever.  Tiger agrees, and travels to Iraq to assemble his rag-tag team of highly skilled RAW agents.

Tiger has a plan.  It's a terrible plan, because Tiger is much better at fighting people than he is at the other aspects of spycraft, but it is a plan.  And things go fairly well at first.  Tiger and his men manage to get jobs at the oil refinery run by expatriate Indian Firdaus (Paresh Rawal), who isn't exactly a terrorist sympathizer but he'll gladly suck up to anyone with power.  All they have to do is stage an industrial accident and they can be sent to the terrorist-occupied hospital.

And then, while meeting a contact in town, Tiger spots Hassan (Jineet Rath), a kid who's been forcibly recruited as a suicide bomber by Abu Usman.  Of course Tiger is going to rescue the kid, but his rescue leads to a running gunfight through town and the death of Tiger's contact.  But just when it looks like Tiger and Hassan are going to die as well, they are rescued by Zoya, who has been recruited by the ISI to rescue the captive Pakistani nurses.  Tiger seizes the opportunity and proposes that RAW and the ISI join forces to rescue all the hostages.

While the main characters are the same in both Tiger movies, there are some noticeable differences between them.  The obvious difference is that Tiger Zinda Hai has an actual villain; Abu Usman may not have a cat or a secret lair, but he is charming, he articulates his motivations clearly and forcefully, and he is a very bad man nonetheless.  

On the other hand, Tiger Zinda Hai is as much a war movie as it is a spy movie.  That means that it leans on some war movie plots, like the member of Tiger's team who brings an Indian flag along so that he can fly it at the end of the mission, but it also means that the movie goes to some dark places, particularly with the treatment of women in the warzone; Zoya does dish out some righteous vengeance to those responsible, but it's still a hell of a tonal shift.

And then there's the question of love versus duty.  When the topic comes up in dialogue, Zoya and the other characters all decide that duty is more important than love after all, though it's worth noting that when put to the test, Tiger and Zoya choose love very single time.

Spy Month: Ek Tha Tiger

Tiger, the titular hero of Ek Tha Tiger (2012), is a spy in the James Bond mold, by which I mean that he's not very good at his job.  Everywhere he goes, people seem to know who he is, and he winds up solving most of his problems with violence.  (And, to be fair, a bit of parkour.)  he's not a straight up Bond clone, though, because Bond is suave and cynical, while Tiger is a good-hearted doofus with basically no idea of how to talk to women.  Fortunately, this is a shadowy world of espionage in which practically everyone is bad at their job.

After an action packed cold open set in Iraq, in which Tiger is forced to hunt down a former colleague at RAW who sold out his country for money, Tiger is in a reflective mood.  His boss Shenoy (Girish Karnad) offers him some time off, but Tiger doesn't really have a life outside of work, so he's eager to return to the field.  While waiting for Tiger's next assignment, Shenoy joins him for a bit of dinner and foreshadowing, with the older man opening up about the woman he loved and lost when he was younger, and the regret he feels every day about choosing duty over love.

Tiger's next assignment is to travel to Dublin and keep an eye on eccentric rocket scientist Kidwai (Roshan Seth), a man whose research forms a vital part of India's missile defense system.  Rumors have been flying about Pakistani agents getting close to the professor, so Tiger has been dispatched to observe only, with strict orders not to kill anyone.  This is not a mission that plays well to Tiger's strengths, and he has been given almost no support apart from fellow agent Gopi (Ranvir Shorey), there to watch his back.

Tiger poses as a writer, and completely fails to make friendly contact with Kidwai.  Fortunately, he does manage to make an impression on Zoya (Katrina Kaif), a dance student from London who is working part time as Kidwai's housekeeper.  Tiger needs to get closer to Zoya in order to get closer to Kidwai, but he finds himself developing feelings for her, and is somewhat hampered by the aforementioned "no idea of how to talk to women" thing.  Fortunately, she seems to like him, too.

And at this point, you've probably figured out what's going on.  Tiger hasn't, because he's bad at his job.  He continues acting like a romantic comedy protagonist, with occasional breaks to chase an ISI agent through the streets of Dublin and to prevent a tram crash.  (It was a busy day.)

Tiger learns of a break in at Kidwai's house and rushes to the scene, only to discover that Zoya has been an ISI agent all along.  He confronts her and . . . confesses his love, because Tiger is going to Tiger.  Zoya says that she was just doing her job, there's a gunshot, and we cut to Tiger back in Delhi being commended for eliminating the Pakistani agent.

But of course Zoya is fine, and it turns out she's been inserting secret messages for Tiger in ISI communications, messages which lead him to a diplomatic conference in Istanbul.  They meet, Tiger confesses his love again, Zoya admits that she loves him as well, and after some angst, they decide to run away together, donning terrible disguises and directing their respective intelligence agencies to Kazakhstan while the couple flees to Havana.

And everything is great and charming and romantic until a group of thugs try to mug the couple and they're caught on CCTV.  Suddenly they're wanted by the local police and Havana is swarming with ISI and RAW agents.  The only way out is through a series of increasingly frenetic action scenes.  Will Tiger and Zoya escape?  Well, there's a sequel, so my money's on yes.

There have been a lot of Bollywood Bond knockoffs over the years, including the inimitable Mithun Chakraborty as Gunmaster G-9, and Ek Tha Tiger follows the outlines of a Bond plot pretty closely, opening with an unrelated action sequence and then visiting three international cities in sequence to provide the backdrop for more action scenes.  However, there are some significant differences, even beyond Salman's earnest persona.  Most significantly, there's no villain.  Or perhaps the true villain is the ongoing tension between Pakistan and India.  Either way, the stake sin the movie are entirely personal, and Love Versus Duty is presented as an actual choice with consequences, rather than a foregone conclusion.  

The other big difference is Zoya.  Tiger's name is in the title, and everything through Dublin is locked to his perspective, but once Tiger and Zoya become an actual couple she steps up and becomes the co-protagonist rather than fading back into damsel in distress status.  And unlike a lot of Bond girls, at the end of the movie Zoya is very much alive, a fact which will be important later.