The last commercial was "In Space," so the obvious next step is . . .

 The Police Universe is cool and all, but I kind of want Rohit Shetty to focus on making noodle commercials.

A heavenly spinoff.

 The death god Yama does not appear in Old Monk (2022), but it still feels an awful lot like a Yama movie.  This time, however, the action centers on the heavenly sage narada.  To quote myself from another review, "Narada is a legendary sage who appears in a number of Hindu texts, including both the Mahabharata and the Ramayana.  In the movies, though, he acts as the local divine trickster; if you have a serious problem, you should get Narada to solve it, since it's probably his fault anyway."  Cinematic Narada usually acts a s a foil to Yama or Indra, inadvertently causing chaos which embarrasses the gods but winds up teaching a valuable moral lesson.  This time, though, he winds up ticking off the wrong god.

Krishna (Sunil Raoh) is enjoying a pleasant afternoon in Heaven, watching a cricket match, when Narada (MG Srinivas) drops by to pay him a visit.  Ten minutes later Krishna's chief wife Rukmini (Meghashree) is about to leave him, because Krishna forgot her birthday while Narada made a big show of remembering.  A furious Krishna curses the celestial sage, banishing him to Earth until he can win the heart of a woman and convince her family to agree to a love marriage.

Narada is reborn as Appanna, the HR manager for an IT firm.  Appanna is not popular with his fellow employees, because he hates love and does everything he can to prevent workplace relationships by keeping men and women separate; he doesn't even allow pictures of married gods, so only bachelor deities like Hanuman and Ganesha can be displayed.  

Appanna explains his motivations in a flashback: his earthly father Narayan (S. Narayan) believes that all marriages should be arranged, and so e has spent years sabotaging every one of his son's attempted relationships.  (It's not just Narayan; there have been many unfortunate coincidences which are probably the work of Krishna.)  As a result, Appanna has decided that if he can't be happy, he doesn't see why anybody else should have a good time.  In fact, that's the reason he became an HR manager in the first place.

Two employees in love complain to their new boss (Sihi Kahi Chandru), and he vows to put a stop to Appanna's antics and get them married, or else he will . . . shave off his mustache!  This proves to be a mistake, because while Appanna is human now, he's still a trickster, and soon the wedding is off, along with the mustache.

Appanna and his sidekick Ranveer Singh (Sujay Shastri) visit a very specialized retirement home designed to reunite old flames, and it's there that he meets and immediately falls for Abhigna (Aditi Prabhudeva).  (She's not a resident, she's running the place.) After a rocky start, he manages to win her heart and make friends with all the residents, and everything is going so well that Abhigna invites him to meet her father, who turns out to be his former boss, sans mustache.  

Up in Heaven, Krishna and his one eyed sidekick (I think he might be Time, but he's definitely played by Satish Chandra) decide it's time to introduce the villain.  Shashank (Sudev Nair) is Abhigna's arranged fiance, Appanna's new boss, the son of a powerful and corrupt politician, and he has been holding a grudge against Appanna since college, when one of Appanna's pranks ended up costing him his girlfriend.  Shashank fires Appanna and then invites him to his wedding to Abhigna.  

Since he comes from a political family, Shashank is running for office.  Since he's mad and doesn't have anything else to do with his time, Appanna decides to run against him, and they both make stupid macho vows about Abhigna's hand in marriage while challenging one another, rather than asking her what she thinks.  Shashank comes form a political dynasty that does not fight fair, but Appanna is the earthly incarnation of a celestial trickster; he doesn't fight fair either.

For most of the movie, Appanna is Appanna rather than Narada.  He claims in a voice over to remember every detail of his heavenly existence, but it has no actual impact on the plot.  Even the curse is pretty quickly forgotten, and Krishna and Time(?) are more like Statler and Waldorf than active antagonists.  Still, Appanna is like the cinematic Narada in one very important way: nearly everything that goes wrong is his fault, spinning out of a scheme or scam or trick gone bad.  Old Monk might be structured like a Yama movie, but when you replace the jolly god of death with an ancient sage who can't resist meddling, the end result is rather different.

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.

This movie brought to you by the tourist board of Amritsar.

 Chandigarh Amritsar Chandigarh (2019) is not a Bollywood movie; it's a product of "Pollywood," the Punjabi film industry, but the storyline is the kind of thing I would expect to see from a Bollywood movie made ten or so years ago.  In fact, it's exactly the story I saw in 2014's Mumbai Delhi Mumbai, which was in turn a remake of the 2010 Marathi film Mumbai-Pune-Mumbai.  It's a very adaptable premise, so you can take any two rival cities, add local cultural flavor to taste, and create your own New York LA New York or Edinburgh Glasgow Edinburgh.

Reet (Sargun Mehta) is a fashion designer form sophisticated Chandigarh.  She's come to bustling Amritsar to meet and reject the potential groom her parents have lined up for her.  Of course, this isn't the way things are normally done.  Usually the groom is supposed to go and meet his potential bride, but Reet wants the whole thing over with, so she's making the trip to Amritsar without consulting her parents.

Almost immediately after arriving, she manages to pick a fight with her rickshaw driver, Murari (Rajpal Yadav) over which city is better, and he winds up cycling away in terror with her phone still in the seat of his rickshaw.  Reet is alone and having trouble navigating the city, so she asks local Rajveer (Gippy Grewal) for directions, spoiling his cricket game in the process.  Rajveer gives her the directions she asks for, she finds the groom's home but discovers that he is not there, and then she realizes that her phone is gone.

Reet asks Rajveer top help her find her phone, and he agrees because he considers it a matter of his city's honor.  And he keeps on helping her, even when they argue. They argue a lot at first - she seems to be a bit stuck up, he seems like exactly the sort of overly dramatic Amritsar guy she's been complaining about, but as the day goes on they start to get along and become friends, despite never finding out the other's name.

Meanwhile, Murari the rickshaw driver is having a terrible day.  Every fare he finds eventually complains of the seat vibrating and eventually slaps him.  He visits a guru who tells him that the rickshaw is haunted, probably due to driving over a lemon (it's a thing) and gives him a list of ridiculous instructions to exorcise it.  And to top it all off, the scary lady from Chandigarh keeps chasing him down and yelling at him for reasons he doesn't understand.  In other words, while Reet and Rajveer are living a romantic comedy, Murari is stuck in the sort of farce that usually stars Rajpal Yadav.  

It's all building up to a final. . . . well, not really a  twist.  A final punchline about the identity of the groom.  I already knew the punchline but if you've seen pretty much any movie ever you can probably figure it out.  But that's okay; a movie like this is all about the journey, and it's a pleasant journey in the company of attractive and ultimately nice people.  Not every movie has to break new ground.