Family Bonds

I've seen a lot of Bollywood Bond pastiches over the years, but The Great Gambler (1979) is one of the more interesting ones, because it takes advantage of the shift in cultural context, mixing Bond-style international intrigue, cool gadgets, secret lairs and a sultry femmes fatale with Bollywood's focus on family, fidelity, and the heroism of the common man.

The common man in question is Jai (Amitabh Bachchan), a streetwise gambler.  Jai may seem rough, but he comes equipped with the requisite heart of gold, and is devoted to his sister Madhu (Madhu Malhotra.)  Jai's amazing gambling skills attract the attention of wealthy casino owner Ratan Das (Madan Puri), who hires him to fleece wealthy patrons in exchange for a share of the winnings.

Ratan Das presents the scheme as practically a joke, but what he doesn't tell Jai is that he's actually seeking to blackmail the losers and sell the material to an international spy ring, a spy ring which communicates through coded messages hidden in dance routines performed by Monica (Helen.)  Though sometimes they just communicate by calling each other on the phone; these guys are dangerous but not especially competent at spying.

After a botched handover, the police get their hands on one of the film canisters, and Inspector Vijay (also Amitabh Bachchan) quickly tracks down Monica, but she's murdered by Sethi (Roopesh Kumar) before she can say anything.  And then the plot kicks into high gear.

Saxena (Utpal Dutt), the spy ring's ringleader, sends Sethi to Rome, along with the secret atomic death ray plans Ratan Das managed to extract from a hapless debtor.  The plan is for offensive Italian stereotype Marconi (Sujit Kumar) to kill Sethi, but Marconi is perhaps the biggest idiot in the gang and fails miserably.  An angry Sethi contacts Indian intelligence and offers to sell the plans back to them, so Vijay is sent to Venice to make the deal.  However, Saxena's gang find out and they send Monica's replacement, Shabnam (Zeenat Aman) to waylay Vijay.

Meanwhile, Ratan Das has a new scheme; his old and very wealthy friend Deepchand (Iftekhar) has a daughter, Mala (Neetu Singh), and wants her to marry Ratan Das's son.  Ratan Das has no son, however, so he sends Jai to marry the girl in order to get his hands on Deepchand's considerable fortune.  Deepchand and Mala live in Lisbon, so both Vijay and Jai have flights to Europe, and that means that Shabnam actually waylays Jai, while Mala meets Vijay at the airport.

There is a lot of plot in this movie, but there's no time to get confused, because something is happening all the time.  Sometimes it's a car chase through the streets of Rome, sometimes it's a romantic evening in Cairo, but there is always something, and it's always dripping with Seventies cool.

The Great Gambler's biggest departure from the Hollywood spy films that inspired it is in the character of the protagonists.  Jai cleans up well, but he's always a street kid at heart, a lovable scamp who follows his own code rather than a cool and collected agent.  Vijay is a cool and collected agent, but he is also a model of proper behavior; he doesn't drink, doesn't smoke, and absolutely refuses to take advantage of Mala when given the opportunity.

I don't think I've ever seen a Bollywood Bond homage put so much effort in balancing spy action with personal drama, but The Great Gambler does it with style.  It still needs more Helen, though.

He's just not that into you, Princess.

Suryavanshi (1992) isn't just a completely ridiculous action-horror movie.  There's plenty of ridiculous action and a fair amount of ridiculous horror, but this is also a movie with a very clear message.  Naturally, that message is also completely ridiculous.

Archeologist DD (Ajit Vachani) is eager to explore the ruined kingdom of Sangramgadh.  Before that can happen, though, he's looking forward to a visit from his dear friend JB (Saeed Jaffrey), a wealthy businessman now living in America.  The reunion goes so well that JB suggests marrying his son Vicky (Salman Khan) to DD's daughter Sonia (Sheeba.)  Sonia is thrilled, but Vicky is a cool modern dude and aspiring daredevil who doesn't want to be tied down.  Sonia offers to refuse the match, but Vicky believes that it's his problem and he should solve it.  Sonia warns him that he needs to refuse the match before their fathers announce it, because once it's public they couldn't possibly subject the family to the shame of a broken union.  Thanks to some early spookiness, though, he bungles the refusal, the relationship is announced, and the wedding takes place.  Sonia assures Vicky that it's a marriage for their parents' sake, she doesn't expect anything from Vicky, and they can secretly remain just good friends.

Now that the loveless marriage has been performed, there's archeology to be done!  DD sends for a local baba (Kader Khan), who delivers the first half of the exposition: Sangamgadh was once a happy and prosperous kingdom, until it fell under the rule of the wicked princess Suryalekha (Amrita Singh.)  The people rose up to overthrow her, but her ghost still haunts the palace, and the land has been cursed ever since.  The baba explains that he has come face to face with the ghost herself, and she will not rest until someone brings her a Suryavanshi (a member of a mythical royal dynasty; the Suryavanshis are an important part of the superhero TV serial Shaktimaan.)  And having delivered the appropriate exposition, the baba dies under mysterious circumstances.

 Dire warnings and mysterious deaths are not enough to stop archeology, though, so the entire cast packs up and heads to the ruins, despite the fact that most of them have no qualifications whatsoever.  After more spookiness, they discover a book written by the kingdom's vizier (Shakti Kapoor) which reveals the other half of the exposition.  Princess Suryalekha owned a secret gladiatorial arena, complete with leopards and a terrifying cannibal in half a gorilla suit, which she used to dispatch the suitors her mother (Sushma Seth) arranged for her.  And then one day the Suyavanshi Vikram Singh (Salman Khan again, this time wearing a ridiculous blond wig and an outfit that makes him look like a knock-off He-Man working in a seedy strip club) arrived and killed all the gladiators and cannibals (but not the leopards), thereby winning her heart.  After the wedding night, though, Vikram leaves, telling the princess that it was all a trick to punish her for the murder of his friend, one of her former suitors.  Then comes murder, suicide, curses, and the angry ghost.


While the angry princess is very clearly a ghost, this is really a mummy movie, with hapless archeologists accidentally releasing the undead monarch of a fallen kingdom, freeing her to seek out the reincarnation of her lost love.  The only thing standing in her way is Sonia, and that's where the film's message comes in.  Over the course of the movie, Sonia is repeatedly described as the ideal Indian wife because she is willing to sacrifice everything for her husband, and doesn't expect anything in return, not even his affection.  The final confrontation makes it clear that Suryalekha's great sin is trying to make Vikram love her back, rather than all the people she's killed over the years.  And no. I have very sturdy disbelief suspenders, and I can happily accept the goofy action scenes and dodgy special effects and the oil painting that has survived for thousands of years and even Salman's terrible wig, but I cannot accept a relationship in which one partner gives up everything and the other gives up nothing as healthy, let alone as the ideal.  It is the silliest thing about a very silly movie.

It's all about loving your parents. And also punching bad guys..

There are some things that naturally go together: pencil and paper, fish and chips, bread and butter, tricks and treats, and, if Ala Vaikunthapurramuloo (2020) is any indication, bombastic South Indian action movies and mid-nineties Bollywood style family drama.

Wealthy businessman Ramachandra (Jayaram) and his employee Valmiki (Murli Sharma) have sons born on the same day at the same hospital.  When it seems that Ramachandra's son has stopped breathing, Vamiki talks the panicked nurse (Sachin Khedekar) into switching the babies.  When the baby starts breathing again, though, Valmiki refuses to switch them back; it turns out he's not motivated by an almost feudal devotion to his employer, he's motivated by jealousy.  Ramachandra and Valmiki started at the company at the same time, but Ramachandra moved up rapidly and married the CEO's daughter, Yasodha (Tabu.)  Knowing that his own son is living a life of luxury while his enemy's son struggles to make ends meet is the perfect revenge.  The nurse tries to stop him, but conveniently falls off a balcony, while Valmiki is struck with a sudden leg cramp that will persist for the next twenty five years.

Valmiki's son grows up in the aforementioned life of luxury, eventually growing into Raj (Sushanth), a young man whom is somewhat spoiled but struggles to find the courage to express himself.  Meanwhile, Valmiki raises Bantu (Allu Arjun), who is brave, clever, spectacularly good at punching, and devoted to absolute truth.  Bantu has spent his entire life trying to win the approval of the man he thinks is his father, but while he excels at everything, it's never enough.

Look, I'll be honest - this movie has a lot of plot, and we'll be here forever if I don't fast-forward to the main conflict.  After a number of (quite interesting and worth watching, even though I'm skipping over them now) misadventures, Bantu finds a job with a travel company, and a potential love interest in his boss Amulya (Pooja Hegde).  He accompanies her to a business meeting, where he forcefully refuses an overly aggressive potential buyer, just as Raj fails to do the same with Paidathalli (Govind Padmasoorya),  a gangster who wants to buy half the company.

Ramachandra overhears Bantu's meeting, and is impressed with the young man.  His father-in-law ARK (Sachin Khedekar) is equally impressed with Amulya, and decides to get her married to Raj.  The pair are quickly engaged before either of them can express their reluctance, and when Bantu and Amulya visit Ramachandra to clear up the confusion, they discover that he has been stabbed by Paidathalli's father, Appala Naidu (Samuthirakani).  Bantu manages to bring Ramachandra to the hospital, where he is quickly brushed aside by the family and finds himself sitting next to a coma patient who happens to be the nurse from the beginning of the movie.  She tells him the truth and promptly dies.  Bantu decides that he can never tell anyone the truth because it would hurt to many people, but his birth family is kind of a mess so he resolves to help them with the power of absolute candor and also to punch all the bad guys, and that's when the movie really takes off.

Whew.  It sounds like there's a lot going on, and there is a lot going on, but the pacing is good enough that you hardly notice, and Bantu is a likable and engaging protagonist, so it is easy to get caught up in his story.  The songs are fun, the action scenes are wonderfully over the top, and the climax manages to combine the two in a way I've never seen before.  The whole movie is like that, really.  It's cinematic chocolate and peanut butter, combining things I like in unexpected ways.

Sudden swerves can be dangerous.

I am not really an expert on Indian cinema, but after so many years of movie watching, I like to consider myself reasonably well versed.  I'm familiar enough with the common tropes that I can generally tell where a noir-tinged hyperviolent South Indian action movie is going, but every now and then I run into a movie like Sketch (2018), a movie which makes me say "Huh?"

Oh, it seems simple enough at first.  Sketch (Vikram) is a repo man; if you miss your car payment, he'll steal it back.  Sketch is good at his job, but his real genius lies in punching people.  Fortunately, his job provides him with plentiful chances to punch, so he leads a simple but fulfilling life.

There are some complications, of course.  While repossessing a scooter, Sketch catches sight of college student Ammu (Tamannaah), and is instantly smitten.  That night, he boasts to his friends that he can woo her in two days, but in the light of day finds he can't work up the nerve, so he settles for lying to his friends and a little light stalking.  The friends see through his lies soon enough, and thanks to a good reputation and a bit of luck, Ammu falls in love with Sketch.

One night Sketch impulsively promises his boss Seth (Hareesh Peradi) that he will retrieve a car from local crime boss Kumar (Baburaj).  Kumar loves his car, and happens to be using it to transport drugs when Sketch takes it away from him, so it's not just a personal humiliation, it's a major blow to his professional reputation, and a furious Kumar orders his men to bring in an outside gang to kill Sketch and his friends.  And sure enough, Sketch's friends are killed off one by one, leaving Sketch to avenge their deaths.  And he does so!  There is punching!

So far, it's all pretty typical for a South Indian action movie.  The romantic plot is particularly thin (especially because the cut of the movie I watched left out all the songs!) and at times it seems like the narration is just papering over plot holes, but Sketch has the kind of hyper-masculine swagger that you only get with South Indian action heroes; it would be terrible in real life, but it's fun in an action movie.  And there is plenty of action.  I was not expecting the twist at all.  I'm about to spoil it, so turn back now if you don't want to know.

Here's the twist:  Kumar's out-of-town killers are are a bunch of idiots who couldn't murder their way out of a paper bag.  They keep showing up just after Sketch's friends have been killed, and quietly take the credit.  The real killers are a group of teenagers that work at the garage with Sketch; the kids felt that Sketch and his friends were standing in their way, and that they would never be the best at stealing cars with Sketch around.  They ambush Sketch and stab him repeatedly while explaining their methods and motivation, but run away when they hear the sound of approaching police sirens.  Near death, Sketch does what he can to cover for them, and the movie ends with a stern warning aboutthe dangers of child labor and the importance of education.

To be fair, the twist doesn't quite come out of nowhere.  The murderteens are very minor characters, but they do appear in the movie before the big revelation, and Sketch does mention the child labor issue at least once.  I don't think the viewer is provided with enough clues to guess the twist beforehand, but but everything does fit together.  It's the sudden shift in tone, as the previously invincible hero is brutally attacked by  a bunch of kids and the narrator directly addresses the audience about an IMPORTANT SOCIAL ISSUE that I found so jarring.  It is a worthy moral that needed a lot more buildup.

Do not lick the naagmani.

Jaani Dushman: Ek Anokhi Kahani (2002) has an amazing cast, including such big names as Akshay Kumar, Sunil Shetty, Manisha Koirola, Arshad Warsi, and Aftab Shivdasani, along with a veritable who's who of Bollywood supporting players, including brief appearances by local favorites Amrish Puri and Johny Lever.  And I can't quite figure out why.  Did they all lose a bet?  Were they being blackmailed?  Have they been cursed by a wicked witch?  Are they professional actors who took a job working with an otherwise well-regarded director because they wanted to be paid?  It is a mystery.

The plot is also kind of hard to figure out, but I will do my best.  Our thirtysomething actors are part of a large group of college students.  The boys all have distinct character traits; Atul (Akshay Kumar) is a charming atheist, Prem (Aftab Shivdasani) is a hapless would be romantic, Vijay (Sunil Shetty) is tough, Abdul (Arshad Warsi) is annoying, Ashok (Aditya Pancholi) is a rich jerk, Rajesh (Rajat Bedi) is a bully with a talent for mimicry, and so on.  (This movie has a big cast)  The girls, on the other hand, are mostly defined by their relationships with men, apart from Divya (Manisha Koirola).  She's tough, fearless, kind, and doomed, and also happens to be engaged to businessman Karan Saxena (Sunny Deol.)  (And I appreciate that they didn't even try to convince us that Sunny Deol is a college student.)

Rajesh and his sidekick Madan (Siddharth Ray) break into the girls' hostel and attempt to rape Divya, only to be stopped and beaten to a pulp by Karan, who drags them to . . . the college principal?  And then convinces the principal to expel them rather than press charges?  And then, when the would be rapists beg not to be expelled because it would ruin their careers, he sends them to ask forgiveness from Divya, and then all her friends pressure her to forgive them and everybody carries on as if nothing happened.  Seriously, what the hell, movie?

Late at night, Divya follows a mysterious voice into a nearby park (which is pretty clearly a painted set, but it's a nice painted set).  The voice belongs to Kapil (Arman Koli), a magical shapechanging snake and Divya's lover in a previous life; long story short, they were dancing and singing through a mystical realm of dodgy computer graphics and accidentally disturbed the meditations of Amrish Puri, who cursed them.

Now Divya is torn between her supernatural lover and Sunny Deol, and that's when her idiot friends call to invite her to a party.  Unfortunately, she winds up talking to Rajesh, who uses his mimicry skills to convince her that she's talking to the whole group, and they all want her to show up an hour early.  She does, Rajesh and Madan attack her, and she kills herself, living just long enough for the whole group to arrive so she can swear vengeance on them all.  Kapil shows up to kill Madan, just to get the ball rolling.

From here, the film becomes a straight supernatural revenge thriller, with Kapil the serpent and Divya's angry ghost picking off the friends one by one.  The twist is that the men who actually attacked her get killed right away, while the rest of the friends are not technically guilty of the crime Divya thinks they are guilty of.  Though when I think back to the "forgive your rapist" scene, I can't help but feel that she still has a point, since none of this would have happened if Rajesh and Madan were in jail where they belong.

The problem is that the cast is huge; normally with this sort of movie the supernatural creatures are working through a group of six or so, but this group is at least twice as big.  The movie never focuses on anyone for very long, and as a result it's hard to tell who the actual protagonist is supposed to be.

Ninety percent of Jaani Dushman is fun bad movie; the special effects are atrocious, the only acting is overacting, and Kapil the ancient shapechanging serpent who spent a thousand years trapped in a  tree spends most of the movie dressed up like Neo from The Matrix for no apparent reason.  The other ten percent can get a bit heavy, though; the actual assault isn't very graphic, but watching everyone in Divya's life fail to support her is infuriating.

*Heavy sigh.*

Jaan-E-Mann: Let's Fall in Love . . . Again (2006) is every bit as subtle as the subtitle implies.  It's a deliberate throwback to the romantic comedies of the mid-Nineties, with gratuitous special effects, choreography by Farah Khan, and an excellent cast (including Preity Zinta, the human Incarnation of Adorableness), and these are all things which I love, so this movie should make me fall in love . . .  again.  And yet, I have not fallen in love . . . again.

Salman Khan plays Suhaan Kapoor, a struggling actor, and the reason he's struggling is that he absolutely refuses to take any role that isn't the lead, and is also kind of a low-key jerk most of the time.  He does have at least one friend, though - his uncle, Boney Kapoor (Anupam Kher), who is . . . . sigh.  Boney is supposed to be a little person, and since Kher is not a little person, they create the illusion by having Kher walk around on his knees.  It is exactly as embarrassing as it sounds.

Suhaan used to be married to Piya (Preity Zinta), but as a convenient song/flashback helpfully explains, when he got his big break, the director was horrified to discover that he had cast a married actor and threatened to fire Suhaan unless he agreed to stay away from his wife until the film's release.  The film finally came out and was a massive flop, and when Suhaan Finally returned home, Piya was gone.  He tried for months to contact her, but in the end the only reply he received was divorce papers.

Suhaan owes Piya a great deal of alimony, and he has no money to pay it (since again, struggling actor who refuses to take any role which is not the lead despite the fact that his one starring role was a box office disaster) but just when things are looking bleak, Agastya Rao (Akshay Kumar) arrives.  Agastya was desperately in love with Piya in college, but she never really noticed him.  Still Agastya, who is now an astronaut, which is important to the framing story and the genuinely terrible final twist but doesn't really play into the main plot of the movie at all, has traveled all the way to India to see her again, only to find Suhaan, instead.  Agastya doesn't realize that Suhaan is the ex-husband, and this gives Boney an idea: if Agastya marries Piya, then Suhaan won't owe her any alimony anymore.

Agastya flies to New York to find Piya, and Suhaan accompanies him as his wingman; it's like Cyrano de Bergerac if Cyrano were a creepy, manipulative jerk.  They rent the apartment directly across from Piya, and set up a powerful telescope to spy on her 24-7, and the movie never, ever calls them out on this outrageous invasion of privacy.  A friendly cafe owner who is also played by Anupam Kher gives them a pair of walkie-talkie earpieces, and thus equipped Agastya makes contact, while Suhaan lurks nearby in a variety of stupid disguises.

First surprise - Piya remembers Agastya.  In fact, she remembers him fondly, and knows that he was in love with someone at college, and left when his heart was broken. Agastya uses Suhaan's knowledge of Piya to insert himself into her life.  So far she clearly thinks of him as a friend, but things are going well, so well that Suhaan is having doubts.

(I will give the movie credit for this: Piya in person is a different, kinder, and more empathetic person than Piya in the flashbacks.  It's clear that both Suhaan and Agastya are remembering her in the context of their own romantic disappointments, rather than as an actual person with agency who is free to love or not love anybody she chooses.  And now I am done giving the movie credit for things.) 

Suhaan's doubts increase thanks to the second surprise - Piya has a daughter.  His daughter.  Suddenly all bets are off.  Suhaan wants his wife and child back, so he goes off to get a job in order to be worthy of them.  Unfortunately, while he is doing this, Agastya and Piya visit her family, Agastya accidentally proposes, and her family pressures her into accepting.  Suhaan nobly sacrifices his love and leaves, which means it's up to Agastya to realize the true situation and arrange things so that husband and wife can finally fall in love . . . again.

I'll be honest.  I watched this movie because I have missed Preity Zinta, and she is genuinely delightful here, displaying her usual mix of bubbly charm and dramatic pathos.  She is not enough to save the movie, though; it's a jumbled mess that can't decide whether to be a David Dhawan style broad comic farce or a Karan Johar style tearjerker, so it tries to be both and fails utterly.

And then there's that final twist.  Normally I try not to spoil this kind of thing, but this movie is bad and I do not want you to watch it, so here it is.  Turn back if you don't want to know.

In the framing story, Agastya is on  a space station (astronaut, remember?), telling his blonde fellow astronaut about his friend Suhaan.  We do not see blonde astronaut's face.  At one point in the main story, Agastya tells Suhaan that it is a scientific fact that everybody in the world has six other people with the same face, and sure enough, at the end we finally see blonde astronaut's face, and yes, she's played by Preity Zinta.  And for some reason she's thrilled to discover that she's the Madelyne Pryor to Piya's Jean Grey, a second choice who only gets her man because she looks just like her man's lost love, and I roll my eyes so hard that they're still sore.

Into the woods.

As the title suggests, Byomkesh Pawrbo (2016) is a movie about Bengali writer Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay's most famous creation, the master detective Byomkesh Bakshi (played here by Abir Chatterjee.)  Byomkesh has been asked to investigate an arms smuggling ring, so he travels to a small town in the forests of northern Bengal, accompanied by his wife Satyabati (Sohini Sarkar) and his faithful sidekick and chronicler Ajit (Ritwick Chakraborty).

When they arrive, there are . . . complications.  The local police inspector (Sumanta Mukherjee) has told everyone that the great detective Byomkesh Bakshi is coming.  The forest is rumored to be haunted by a "ghost rider," a spectral figure dressed in black and mounted on a black horse.  The town has multiple shady industrialists/obvious suspects.  And Satyabati, who insisted on joining the expedition, comes down with a serious case of cabin fever.

And then there are the murders.  A young man is killed, apparently by the ghost rider.  While investigating that death, Byomkesh witnesses another man getting blown up by a booby trap.  Fortunately. Byomkesh isn't just a well-read eccentric with keen observational skills, he's also a two-fisted man of action with a knack for disguise and a working knowledge of the Mahabharata.

I don't really have very much to say about Byomkesh Pawrbo; it's a well crafted mystery with engaging actors, and despite the arms smugglers it's closer to what you might see in Midsomer Murders than the pulp craziness of 2015's Detective Byomkesh Bakshi.  It's definitely worth your time if you're into that sort of thing.