Post by odadune on Jan 25, 2015 0:46:04 GMT
Just saw this movie, with the More Casual Fan. This was the MCF's first time watching an Indian movie on the big screen. (The MCF has sometimes played navigator or driver on my trips to the Big Theater Far Away, but had usually done shopping or watched other movies on those trips). There were maybe ten other people in the theater, who laughed at most of the film's rather dry humor, cheered at a couple of the patriotic lines (notably "In the religion column on all those forms, I write INDIAN bold and black"), and got slightly restive during the extended climax. Holiday and Special 26 had seemed fuller than this, but those were true afternoon showings and this was around noon. We were shown truncated trailers for Detective Byomkesh Bakshi (which looked pretty good on the big screen), Badlapur (which I wasn't anymore impressed with this time around), and Broken Horses (which mostly looked bizarre and stupid).
We both liked Baby, but then again, we generally like spy movies and don't mind counterterrorist movies provided they're either blatantly escapist fluff (thinking of some of the old Golan-Globus movies) or make at least some efforts to acknowledge that Muslim=/=terrorist. This is a well-made, exciting "team espionage" movie of the same school as the original Mission: Impossible series, something that's tense and weirdly fascinating even though you can see the plot holes and plot contrivances.
This one kind of looked like it wanted to be more about the root causes of terrorism but the filmmakers had been forced to tone it down somewhat for fear of offending the people in power: there is a scene, where Danny Dezongpa's character (a Muslim named Feroze Khan who heads up the counterterror team) argues that the country has failed the Muslim community and driven them into the arms of the radicals, but he kind of dances around the issue a lot (admittedly, he's addressing some kind of Modi-lookalike senior politician, so maybe the character, rather than the scriptwriter, feels he needs to step gingerly). There is also a strangely poignant episode where a young engineering student tells Akshay's character about how he (the student) was recruited into a terror network and what motivated him to turn against his handlers.
Overall though, this is more or less the kind of spy movie you would expect the director of Special 26 to make-maybe a shade less quirky. People are constantly on the move, walking, stalking, pacing, running, driving, and the sense of urgency more comes from clever editing, and the possibility of what might happen, than anything happening on the screen. You are apparently expected to use these sequences to look into the characters and figure them out yourself. Taapsee Pannu's character prepares nervously for a situation that might develop into a fight, and a few minutes later she's using stances straight out of training school, as though she's seldom or never been in a real fight, and you deduce that she's new to field work. Akshay's character is somber and jaded; early on he "mercy-kills" a fellow agent who's been tortured almost to death by the terrorists, and after that he proceeds to rough up anyone who messes with his people, but most of the time he relies on psych-warfare when he actually wants information out of them. You get the impression (well, I got the impression) that he's been doing this too long, and is starting to lose his edge, and perhaps even lose himself. There's a Muslim detective in a foreign country who ends up investigating some of the death and destruction the team leaves behind them, and again, you need to be paying attention to some of the things he says about the victims to pick up on his ultimate motives.
Overall, it's well-acted, with Anupam and Kay Kay standing out in small quirky roles and Akshay being dangerous and quietly intense and yet vulnerable (Neeraj Pandey is still fascinated by this gentleman's nose and eyes, for some reason. Not that I object!) Rana Daggubati does well with what he is given, as do the actors from Turkey and the Emirates. Taapsee does well in her big fight scene and her character (theoretically a "honeypot" operative) is treated respectfully, but the actress herself is even blander than Kajal Aggarwal in Special 26, and Token Dashing Young Guy From Pakistani TV is so boring that he makes her look like Kangna Ranaut by comparison. Neither of them are actively bad, just not great. Madhurima Tuli does fairly well as Akshay's wife; there's a touch of Special 26 Syndrome in that she comes off as way more into him than he is into her, but you could argue that's just the nature of the character dynamic, where she's a fairly normal, healthy homemaker and he's this guy who's seen and inflicted way too much suffering in the course of his day job. The main flop in the characterization department is the elderly, crazy-like-a-fox, vaguely skeevy mullah. The actor seems talented but the character is pitched as too much of a weirdo and a crackpot to believe in him as an influential leader, and some idiot (I assume one of the producers) decided we needed a random closeup of him grinning with firelight reflected in his eyes.
I found most of this movie (2hrs 39 minutes) to be fairly engrossing; there's a couple of sections after the last plot twist where I got antsy (and so did the rest of the audience), and I wasn't quite sure how much of it was concern for the characters and how much of it was just wanting the situation wrapped up. The MCF felt the very end was overly spun out. The other thing I will say is that the film assumes you are familiar with spy movies and covert ops stories to some extent; a particular plot twist about the characters stumbling across an important maguffin felt like the kind of bizarre, random thing that happens in the real world, and the MCF claimed that the scene where the characters reduce the air pressure in their SUV's tires in order to drive on sand (which was much mocked by some of the reviewers) was actually a real world technique.
Basically, if the genre interests you and you don't mind the cast (or the cast interests you and you don't mind the genre), this is a very solid movie and well-worth a look, but I mean, it is a movie about secularist/Hindu/Sikh characters fighting Muslim terrorists with the help of more mainstream Muslims, where the main protagonist thinks it's perfectly okay to hit captives and political office minions if they hurt or insult his colleagues, and makes incredibly baroque threats by way of interrogation. If that's not your thing, then this movie is unlikely to do much for you.
We both liked Baby, but then again, we generally like spy movies and don't mind counterterrorist movies provided they're either blatantly escapist fluff (thinking of some of the old Golan-Globus movies) or make at least some efforts to acknowledge that Muslim=/=terrorist. This is a well-made, exciting "team espionage" movie of the same school as the original Mission: Impossible series, something that's tense and weirdly fascinating even though you can see the plot holes and plot contrivances.
This one kind of looked like it wanted to be more about the root causes of terrorism but the filmmakers had been forced to tone it down somewhat for fear of offending the people in power: there is a scene, where Danny Dezongpa's character (a Muslim named Feroze Khan who heads up the counterterror team) argues that the country has failed the Muslim community and driven them into the arms of the radicals, but he kind of dances around the issue a lot (admittedly, he's addressing some kind of Modi-lookalike senior politician, so maybe the character, rather than the scriptwriter, feels he needs to step gingerly). There is also a strangely poignant episode where a young engineering student tells Akshay's character about how he (the student) was recruited into a terror network and what motivated him to turn against his handlers.
Overall though, this is more or less the kind of spy movie you would expect the director of Special 26 to make-maybe a shade less quirky. People are constantly on the move, walking, stalking, pacing, running, driving, and the sense of urgency more comes from clever editing, and the possibility of what might happen, than anything happening on the screen. You are apparently expected to use these sequences to look into the characters and figure them out yourself. Taapsee Pannu's character prepares nervously for a situation that might develop into a fight, and a few minutes later she's using stances straight out of training school, as though she's seldom or never been in a real fight, and you deduce that she's new to field work. Akshay's character is somber and jaded; early on he "mercy-kills" a fellow agent who's been tortured almost to death by the terrorists, and after that he proceeds to rough up anyone who messes with his people, but most of the time he relies on psych-warfare when he actually wants information out of them. You get the impression (well, I got the impression) that he's been doing this too long, and is starting to lose his edge, and perhaps even lose himself. There's a Muslim detective in a foreign country who ends up investigating some of the death and destruction the team leaves behind them, and again, you need to be paying attention to some of the things he says about the victims to pick up on his ultimate motives.
Overall, it's well-acted, with Anupam and Kay Kay standing out in small quirky roles and Akshay being dangerous and quietly intense and yet vulnerable (Neeraj Pandey is still fascinated by this gentleman's nose and eyes, for some reason. Not that I object!) Rana Daggubati does well with what he is given, as do the actors from Turkey and the Emirates. Taapsee does well in her big fight scene and her character (theoretically a "honeypot" operative) is treated respectfully, but the actress herself is even blander than Kajal Aggarwal in Special 26, and Token Dashing Young Guy From Pakistani TV is so boring that he makes her look like Kangna Ranaut by comparison. Neither of them are actively bad, just not great. Madhurima Tuli does fairly well as Akshay's wife; there's a touch of Special 26 Syndrome in that she comes off as way more into him than he is into her, but you could argue that's just the nature of the character dynamic, where she's a fairly normal, healthy homemaker and he's this guy who's seen and inflicted way too much suffering in the course of his day job. The main flop in the characterization department is the elderly, crazy-like-a-fox, vaguely skeevy mullah. The actor seems talented but the character is pitched as too much of a weirdo and a crackpot to believe in him as an influential leader, and some idiot (I assume one of the producers) decided we needed a random closeup of him grinning with firelight reflected in his eyes.
I found most of this movie (2hrs 39 minutes) to be fairly engrossing; there's a couple of sections after the last plot twist where I got antsy (and so did the rest of the audience), and I wasn't quite sure how much of it was concern for the characters and how much of it was just wanting the situation wrapped up. The MCF felt the very end was overly spun out. The other thing I will say is that the film assumes you are familiar with spy movies and covert ops stories to some extent; a particular plot twist about the characters stumbling across an important maguffin felt like the kind of bizarre, random thing that happens in the real world, and the MCF claimed that the scene where the characters reduce the air pressure in their SUV's tires in order to drive on sand (which was much mocked by some of the reviewers) was actually a real world technique.
Basically, if the genre interests you and you don't mind the cast (or the cast interests you and you don't mind the genre), this is a very solid movie and well-worth a look, but I mean, it is a movie about secularist/Hindu/Sikh characters fighting Muslim terrorists with the help of more mainstream Muslims, where the main protagonist thinks it's perfectly okay to hit captives and political office minions if they hurt or insult his colleagues, and makes incredibly baroque threats by way of interrogation. If that's not your thing, then this movie is unlikely to do much for you.