Shah Rukh and Son. (The son is also Shah Rukh.)

 Shah Rukh Khan's comeback tour continues with Jawan (2023), which is reminiscent of some of Kahn's older movies while still being very much its own thing.  Critics have mentioned thematic similarities to Phir Bhi Dil Hai Hindustani, Chak De! India, Swades, and Chennai Express, but it really feels like writer-director Atlee looked at the over the top political metaphor of Oh Darling! Yeh Hai India! and decided that metaphor is for cowards.

The plot of Jawan is fairly straightforward, but it's one of those movies in which the backstory is slowly filled in through a series of nested flashbacks.  The film opens in 1986, with a mysterious bandaged  amnesiac (Shah Rukh Khan) saving a remote village from an attacking force of Chinese soldiers.  Then the movie jumps to the present, with a subway train taken hostage by a small band of highly trained women, each with their own special skillset: Lakshmi (Priyamani), Doctor Eeram (Sanya Malhotra),  Helena (Sanjeeta Bhattacharya), Ishkra (Girija Oak), Kalki (Lehar Khan), and Jahnvi (Aaliyah Qureisha).  The women answer to a mysterious bandaged mastermind (Shah Rukh Khan), who demands a hostage negotiator that's interesting to talk to.

The authorities select Narmada (Nayanthara), head of the counter-terrorist unit Force One.  The bandaged man plays the villain for a while, then reveals his demands - four hundred million rupees, enough to pay off the loans of seven hundred thousand farmers.  As it happens, Alia (Ashlesha Thakur), daughter of legitimate businessman/arms dealer Kalee (Vijay Sethupathi), is on the train, and he agrees to pay the ransom.  This is not a coincidence.

When the train arrives at the station, Narmada has her men waiting to arrest the hijackers, but by this point the bandaged man has won over the hostages by explaining the predatory nature of loans to farmers and the resulting high rate of suicide among them, and because he only pretended to kill a hostage to show how serious he was.  With the help of the hostages and a fair amount of hugely unlikely technological trickery, the hijackers escape, but before they go the leader asks Alia to tell her father his name: Vikram Rathore.

He is not actually Vikram Rathore. He's Azad, warden of a women's prison that focuses on rehabilitation and restorative justice rather than punishment.  His six accomplices are all inmates at the prison who have all suffered various forms of social injustice, and Azad's plan is to expose government corruption, help the common man, and, as later flashbacks reveal, clear the name of his father, Vikram Rathore, who was branded a traitor and apparently murdered after exposing defective weapons that Kalee's company sold to the military.

Meanwhile, Azad's foster mother Kaveri (Riddhi Dogra) is looking for a bride for him.  The latest candidate was too busy to meet with him, and rather than send her parents she sent her ten year old daughter Suji (Seeza Saroj Mehta), who is in the market for a father.  Azad and Suji get along well, and when her mother turns out to be Narmada, they get along as well.  The match is made.

Azad wants to tell her the truth, but before he can bring himself to do it, on their wedding night, she discovers that he's the criminal she's been chasing.  Before she can arrest him, though, the honeymoon cabin is attacked by armed men led by Kalee's brother Manish (Eijaz Khan), who thinks they're working together.  He shoots Narmada and is about to kill Azad when Vikram Rathore appears.  He's not dead after all, but he still has amnesia.  On the other hand, he is a decent fellow and a trained soldier, so he's happy to rescue his son even though he feels no emotional connection.  It does not go well for Manish.

Kalee was in Russia attending an International Conference of Evil Businessmen, which is the kind of thing that happened a lot in Nineties Bollywood action movies.  He's hoping to raise enough money to buy himself into political office, and then open up India as a haven for evil businessmen to build massive polluting factories without having to worry about environmental regulations or basic safety.  (This is not a subtle movie.)  A mobster with a Darth Vader breath mask offers to put up the money, threatening dire consequences if he is not paid back on time.  But before Kalee can put his plans into action, he needs to take revenge on his old enemy Vikram for Manish's death.

So Kalee wants revenge and power, in that order.  Vikram, Azad, and the ladies want to steal Kalee's money, to end his power and make India a better place for the common people.  Narmada, who is also not dead, wants to arrest her wayward husband, though there's a good chance that she can be won over by the right bit of exposition.  The plot may be complicated, but the sides are clear, and there's room for key cameos from Sanjay Dutt and Deepika Padukone.

When an actor is playing a  dual role, it's important that the characters are distinctive enough to be easily distinguishable.  Azad is a fairly typical SRK protagonist, prone to big displays of emotion, impassioned and inspiring speeches, and dancing with his arms extended.  Vikram, as an older amnesiac, is quirky and largely detached from what's going on around him.  He's just happy to help, especially if helping involves spontaneous displays of violence.  

 The characters are also distinguished in the action scenes; Azad is an over the top Bollywood action hero, skilled and blessed with a great deal of luck, especially evil henchmen who keep forgetting that they have guns and attacking one at a time.  Vikram is more like an over the top South Indian action hero, operating on an entirely different level.  He's capable of the kind of stunts you see in Bahubali or RRR.

As huge and improbable as the actions scenes are, though, it's the plot that really stretches suspension of disbelief, particularly the notion that Azad and his friends can achieve lasting political change through their Robin Hood antics; at one point they overhaul India's entire medical system in the space of five hours.  It's a movie with its heart in the right place, especially Azad's final speech, in which he pleads with the public to use the power of their vote carefully, asking those seeking office what they will do to help the country and the common people instead of being distracted by fear or labels.  And that could lead to social change, but acts of heroic crime probably won't.

Love and elephants.

Dil Tera Hogaya (2020)  is a little different from my usual fare; it's not just a movie from Pakistan, it's a TV movie from Pakistan.  It manages to feel very familiar, but with a few notable differences.

Ahmad (Jawed Sheikh) and his brother Arshad (Farhan Ally Agha) live together in their family estate in Pakistan.  The brothers get along well, but their wives, Fehmi (Saba Faisal) and Zoobi (Shaheen Khan), respectively, do not.  The women were childhood friends, but they've had a serious falling out, and they've partitioned the house, with Chanda the maid (Mizna Waqas) moving back and forth between the feuding in-laws, taking advantage where she can.

Fehmi works as a dressmaker and designer, though it seems that a good part of her business is making copies of other designers.  She's assisted by her son Annu (Feroze Khan), and she's raised him to be just as invested in the family feud as she is.  Zoobi has a YouTube channel where she cooks recipes she's stolen form other chefs, and her daughter Roma (Zara Noor Abbas) is even more eager to pick fights.  Annu and Roma do most of the actual feuding, in fact; as the movie starts, Roma lets the air out of Annu's tires so she can reach a job interview before him, he shows up to confront her, and they argue so loudly and vehemently that they're both kicked out of the building.

Ahmad and Arshad are on separate business trips to Dubai, but it's really an excuse top spend some time together without their family being actively horrible to one another.  They're trying to find a way to heal the family rift, but everything changes when Fehmi faints and is diagnosed with a brain tumor.  The men rush home, and for a while, the feud is forgotten and Zoobi and Fehmi are as close as they ever were.  Fehmi is particularly interested in getting Annu married before she dies, and Zoobi agrees to help.

Meanwhile, Roma and Annu are speaking civilly to one another for perhaps the first time in their lives, and they maybe don't hate each other after all?  Maybe they love each other?  The transition from sworn enemies to secret love interests happens really quickly, though to be fair it's a relatively short TV movie and they need to get to the song already.  Also, they grew up in the same house so they don't need to spend a lot of time getting to know each other.

And then disaster strikes.  The sisters-in-law overhear their husbands bragging about their successful scheme to bring the family closer together and get Roma and Annu married by faking Fehmi's cancer diagnosis.  Rather than get mad at their husbands, which would be sensible because convincing someone they're terminally ill is a genuinely awful thing to do, they're mad at one another.  The feud is back on, and now they're competing to see who can get their child married first.  Will Roma and Annu find a way to be together?

No.  That's not how things work in this kind of family drama/romance.  They'll make some noble speeches and give up their love for the sake of their family, but other characters will have an offscreen change of heart and everything will work out in the end. These movies don't normally end with the young couple directly addressing the camera to tell the audience that Eid is a great time to reconcile with your family and settle all your differences, but Dil Tera Hogaya was originally presented as  a holiday special, so fair enough.

So, elephant in the room.  Arshad and Ahmad are brothers, which means that Roma and Annu are first cousins.  That's a cultural thing; cousin marriage is both legal and relatively common in Pakistan, and I am not going be critiquing a culture that is not my own here.  I will say that growing up in the same household does push the dynamic closer to squabbling siblings than I would like.

Elephants aside, this is very Nineties Bollywood family drama, with big emotions, lots of talk about family values, protagonists who are kind of terrible until they fall in love, and everyone getting forgiven in the end.  It's just shorter, with one song, a handful of sets, and a small cast who mostly live in the same house.

Et tu, Jackie?

 I'm not sure what Mark Antony (2023) is trying to be.  Time travel comedy?  Gangster melodrama?  Incredibly loose Shakespeare adaptation?  Satirical commentary on all of the above?  Whatever it is, though, it commits to the bit.

 

In 1975, scientist Chiranjeevi (Selvaraghavan) has finally completed his grand invention, a telephone with the power to call the past.  he tests the phone by calling his past self, preventing an accident which cost his wife (Anitha Sampath) a leg and a teaching career.  After a bit of further experimenting, he figures out the rules; there are a lot of them, but the important ones are that the phone can only call a particular number once per day (as perceived by the receiver, not the caller), the phone can absolutely change the past, and only the caller will remember the original timeline.  he goes out to a nightclub to celebrate, and is shot during the assassination of powerful gangster Antony (Vishal.)  A dying Chiranjeevi tries to use the phone to save himself, fails, and dies with a quick speech about how no man can cheat fate, despite the fact that he has already cheated fate more than once.  

In 1995, Antony's old partner Jackie (S. J. Suryah) has taken over the business, and rules as the town's sole godfather.  Jackie is a benevolent crimelord, and is especially devoted to taking care of Antony's son Mark (also Vishal).  Mark is grateful, but he has absolutely no interest in a life of crime, because he blames his father for the murder of his mother Vedhavalli (Abhinaya).  Instead, he works as a mechanic and dreams of marrying the beautiful Ramya (Ritu Varma) and moving to a place where no one knows about his shameful family history.

Jackie's own son, Madhan (also S. J. Suryah) is very interested in a life of crime, and is planning to murder his father and take over the organization.  He's not very good at it, though,  and Jackie either doesn't notice or doesn't care, so everyone maintains a comfortable but dysfunctional equilibrium.

And then everything changes.  Ramya's mother discovers that Mark's father was the notorious Antony, so any hope of an engagement is shattered.  And then he discovers a phone locked in a suitcase stuffed in a car that used to belong to Ramya's deceased uncle Chiranjeevi.  He discovers a notebook giving instructions for how to use the phone, starts making calls, and things get weird.  

Mark wants to learn what his father was really like, so he uses the phone to prevent the death of  Antony's lawyer (Nizhalgal Ravi) and arranges a meeting in order to ask him.  He does, and discovers that his father was actually a loving husband and wonderful person, and all the drug peddling, gun running and prostitution was actually Jackie's doing, while Antony used his crime ring to protect the community.  Jackie pops up to confirm that yes, he's been the villain all along, and he's going to kill them both.  Mark manages to call his father, and history changes.

In the new timeline, Jackie is dead, Antony is gone, Mark is the crimelord and Madhan is the mechanic.  Nobody is happy.  This version of Ramya hates Mark, Mark doesn't have the skills to runa  criminal empire, and Madhan wants money, power, and revenge on Mark.  Mark tries to fix things using the phone, then Madhan steals it and calls his father, leading to a series of failed assassination attempts and a brief appearance by eighties sex symbol Silk Smitha (Vishnu Priya Gandhi).

That synopsis makes Mark Anthony sound almost mundane, just a South Indian gangster action comedy mixed with Back to the Future.  And it is, most of the time, but everything is stylized and tremendously stylized and really big.  The action scenes aren't quite Bahubali level, but they are impressively improbable, particularly the big set piece on a double decker bus.  And then 1995 Antony appears and takes everything up a level.

The plot, on the other hand, is pretty much nonsense, with time travel rules that make Back to the Future seem like hard science fiction.  And I'm still not sure if the movie is trying to be a loose adaptation of Julius Caesar, with Antony literally stabbed in the back by a circle of his closest friends and Mark trying to avenge him and right the ship of (criminal) state.