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.

Zoinks! It's a gh-gh-gh-gh-Gandhi!

Lage Raho Munna Bhai (2006) is one of Bollywood's indirect sequels; several of Munna Bhai M.B.B.S's cast members return, but the only recurring characters are Munna and his faithful friend Circuit, and there are no references to the events of the previous movie.  It's also a solid improvement over the original film, which was already pretty good.

Regardless of continuity, Munna (Sanjay Dutt) is always Munna, a charming gangster who make shis living kidnapping people for profit and clearing houses at the behest of crooked real estate developer Lucky Singh (Boman Irani.)  As always, Munna is assisted and supported by his loyal right hand man Circuit (Arshad Warsi.)  They're not exactly gangsters with hearts of gold; the pair are funny, even affable, but they still make their living through the judicious application of violence, and they aren't sorry about it.

Munna's a bit distracted these days, because he's fallen in love with the voice of radio DJ Jhanvi (Vidya Balan.).  Munna refuses to work during her show, instead sitting by ocean and listening while Circuit handles all of their criminal duties.  So when Jhanvi announces a Gandhi trivia contest, with the winner having the chance to meet her in person, Munna has to win.

As always, Circuit makes it happen, organizing a phone bank to flood the lines so that no one else can get through and a small collection of kidnapped history professors to feed Munna the correct answers.  (The professors are sent home with a collection of nice prizes afterwards.)  Munna wins, obviously, and when he meets Jhanvi and she asks him what he does for a living, he blurts out that he's a history professor.  Jhanvi is delighted, and invites Munna to deliver a lecture to the residents of the retirement home she hosts at her house.  Before Circuit can stop him, Munna agrees.

There's no obvious way to cheat his way through a lecture, so Munna decides he has to learn something about Gandhi.  He heads to the library for five days of intensive study, and within a few days, he can see a vision of Gandhi (Dilip Prabhavalkar), who agrees to help him in exchange for a price to be named later. Nobody else can see Gandhi, though Circuit politely pretends. (Gandhi is quick to point out that he is not a ghost or a spirit, he is "inspiration."  This will be important later.)  With Gandhi's help, Munna delivers a rough but stirring lecture, impressing Jhanvi in the process.  Things are going well, and then Gandhi names his price: Munna must tell Jhanvi the truth about who he is.  Munna refuses, and Gandhi leaves, promising to return when he's called.

Meanwhile, Circuit has accepted a job from Lucky Singh to clear out an old folk's home.  Lucky needs the land as a gift, or perhaps dowry, for the future father in law (Kulbhushan Kharbanda) of his daughter Simran (Dia Mirza.)  Of course it's Jhanvi's house, but Circuit doesn't realize that.  Lucky does, however, so he offers to send Munna, Jhanvi, and all of the home's residents on a trip to Goa; after they're gone he quietly sends Circuit to clear out the house and take possession.

Munna and Jhanvi have a wonderful time.  He's about to propose when she gets the call that the house has been seized, so everybody hurries back.  There are legal remedies but they would take years, and if Munna tries his usual extortion on Lucky, his secret will come out, so only Gandhi can help them.  Gandhi promises to help, as long as Munna makes up with Circuit.  He does, and the dispossessed old folks begin a campaign of "Gandhigiri," camping out on the street in front of Lucky's house while Munna and Jhanvi host a radio show offering Gandhilike advice to the people who call in.  The show becomes a huge hit, and Munna and Jhanvi ask their fans to send flowers to their friend Lucky along with messages urging him to "Get Well Soon," because dishonesty is a disease but they will be there for him until he recovers.

Lucky makes Munna a fairly generous counteroffer and when Munna refuses, threatens to reveal the truth to Jhanvi at seven o'clock the following morning.  Gandhi offers Munna the only possible advice in that situation: tell her first.  he does, she slaps him and leaves, and suddenly Lucky is dealing with a determined (if peaceful) protest from a man with nothing to lose.  And the radio show is such a hit that Munna is allowed to keep doing it even without Jhanvi.  The only problem is that Munna told Lucky about Gandhi, and in a battle of public perception, knowing your opponent is getting advice from his imaginary friend is one heck of a weapon.

Lage Raho Munna Bhai was written in part as an attempt to rekindle public interest in Gandhi and his teachings.  And it worked!  The film sparked a wave of Gandhigiri style protests against various injustices across India and in the US, and many of them were successful.  The film also prompted a rise in public service projects by young people.  It's a good movie in the artistic sense, but it's also a good movie in the moral sense, in that it inspired actual people to do good in the real world.

It's still a movie, though, and the characters need to be as interesting as the politics.  Munna and Circuit start out as charming rogues living a life of apparently consequence free crime.  Their violent antics are funny up until the point when they are not, and they have to face the people they've hurt.  Fortunately Gandhi is here to help with that, too, and he gives some pretty solid advice.  Tell the truth.  Say "sorry" when you've hurt someone, and mean it.  let yourself be vulnerable, and take care of the people you love.  Caring about people and being open and honest with the ones you love is presented as an act of courage, a challenge that our heroes learn to meet.  Turns out this Gandhi fellow has some good ideas.

There's certainly less police brutality than in Singham.

Long time readers will know that I have a theory about film: any any premise can be turned into a comedy by adding the words "Wackiness ensues" to the description.  In the case of Son of Sardaar (2012), wackiness ensues when a man seeks to escape a murderous blood feud by hiding out in the house of his family's sworn enemies.

Jassi Randhawa (Ajay Devgn) is the titular Son of Sardaar, a freespirited Punjabi man now living a carefree life in London.  The opening musical number and subsequent fight scene serve to establish the important facts about his character in a hurry: he is serious about his culture and faith, he tells terrible jokes, he believes in peace but is very good at beating people up, and he is best friends with Pathan (Salman Khan), who will not be sticking around for the rest of the movie.  

 Jassi receives a letter informing him that his late father left him some land back home in India, which the government would like to buy.  Before Jassi leaves, though, Pathan's father delivers some important exposition: the Randhava family had been involved in a brutal blood feud with the neighboring Sandhus, Jassi's father was killed by the Sandhus, but killed their family head in the process, and the Sandhus will not rest until the Randhavas have been wiped out entirely.  Jassi laughs it off.  It's been twenty five years, and surely the Sandhus have forgotten the whole blood feud business by now.

Meanwhile, in India, a quick scene with the Sandhus establishes the important facts about their family: they have not forgotten the whole blood feud business, current family head Billu (Sanjay Dutt) has vowed not to marry his beloved Pammi (Juhi Chawla) until Jassi has been killed, Billu is terrifyingly good at beating people up, and the family takes the laws of hospitality very seriously.  They won't harm a guest while they are in the house no matter how much they deserve it, but the moment they step out, they are fair game.  Still, they are a nice family apart from the bouts of violence.

On the train to Punjab, Jassi meets Sukh (Sonakshi Sinha), and is immediately smitten.  She is at least somewhat amused by his antics, so there's a chance there.  Naturally, Sukh is actually Billu's (much) younger cousin, but the pair are separated before either of them can figure out the connection.

Jassi gets a ride from Billu's brother Tony (Mukul Dev.)  Tony does figure out Jassi's identity, but by that time Jassi has gone on his way, and all of Tony's repeated murder attempts end in cheap slapstick and an oblivious Jassi wandering off.  Jassi meets Billu and is invited to the family home, and it is only after he is safely inside that Tony manages to tell Billu who Jassi is, and Jassi figures out where he is.

Drama is all about conflict, and there's a clear conflict here.  Billu wants to kill Jassi and fulfill his oath and finally marry Pammi, but he can't as long as Jassi is in the house.  Jassi would like to not be murdered, and would also like to put an end to the feud if at all possible and while he's making a wishlist, marrying Sukh would be pretty great as well, so he needs to stay in the house, whether that means faking an injury or charming the members of the family who don't actively want to kill him yet.  And Pammi and Sukh are both active characters with their own goals that they work toward; granted, in both cases that goal is "Find a way to marry the man I love," but they actively pursue that goal instead of waiting around as a prize to be won.

Except the movie is not a drama, it's a strange genre hybrid, a blood-soaked revenge farce.  The tone is consistent throughout - even the flashback to the murderfest of twenty five years ago has a pretty good sight gag - but it's distracting.  The brain has to reconcile the slapstick comedy and light romance with Sanjay Dutt the lovable goofball with a dozen men with swords camped out to kill our hero the moment he steps outside.

Still, a movie can coast a long way on charm, and this movie has a great cast with charm to spare.  Sonakshi Sinha has spunk, Ajay Devgn manages to be both funny and badass, Sanjay Dutt has Munnabhai-like charm while being considerably more bloodthirsty than he was as Munnabhai, and Juhi Chawla is, well, Juhi Chawla.  And "Don't waste your life on a pointless blood feud, even if you took a vow" is something we all need to be reminded of every now and then.

If you're not angry, you're not paying attention.

There are a lot of Indian comedies that revolve around social issues (many of them starring Ayushmann Khurana - it's sort of his thing) but Jayeshbhai Jordaar (2022) is a comedy that really revolves around social issues.

Jayesh (Ranveer Singh) is the son of Pruthvish (Boman Irani), the head of their rural village.  Jayesh is outwardly meek, and will publicly back his father even when he does something utterly ridiculous like respond to complaints of sexual harassment at the village's school by banning soap for girls so that their fragrance cannot lead men astray.  Privately, Jayesh is utterly devoted to his wife Mudra (Shalini Pandey) and their daughter Siddhi (Jia vaidya).  They have a very traditional rural Indian marriage, but Jayesh secretly longs for a  kiss from his wife.

Pruthvish, on the other hand, longs for a male heir, and he's anything but secretive about it.  Mudra is pregnant again, and Pruthvish is very clear: if the ultrasound shows that it's a boy, the whole village will celebrate, but if it's a girl the pregnancy will be quietly terminated, just like the ones before.  The whole family is praying fervently for a male heir, but thanks to a quiet word from a discrete doctor Jayesh already knows that it's a girl, and he's been making plans.

They're not necessarily good plans; Jayesh has fixated on the idea of running away to the village of Ladopur, a village where the gender balance has completely toppled, leaving a population of friendly but lonely wrestlers who vow to protect all women.  When Jayesh's parents announce that they've found a new doctor to give Mudra an ultrasound, it's time to go, but they only way they can think of to get out of the house is faking an abduction, with Mudra holding her husband hostage with a pair of scissors.

And from there - well, they run.  Pruthvish chases them, helped by pretty much all of the men in the village. For a while, the movie pretends to be a road trip comedy, so they meet people, get separated, nearly get captured, are betrayed, are rescued.  It's increasingly clear that Jayesh is going to have to step up (Siddhi tells him as much) but he spends much of the road trip trying to figure out what form that can take.

And that leads to the central paradox of Jayeshbhai Jordaar; it's very serious social commentary dressed up as a roadtrip comedy, with a family of goofy eccentrics having adventures while running from a crushing and downright dystopian existence.  At its best, the movie reminds me of Terry Pratchett: often funny, always heartfelt, and incandescently angry.

The movie is not always at its best.  The escape-captured-escape cycle repeats a few too many times, the dialogue is a bit shaky at times, and while it's a movie about societal oppression of women, it's a very male-centered narrative. The focus is on Jayesh's emotional journey, though though that does help underline some of the ways in which men are also hurt by institutional sexism.  

In the end, Jayeshbhai Jordaar is like Jayesh himself; it's heart is in the right place, but it stumbles a bit along the way.