Post by odadune on Dec 7, 2013 6:54:00 GMT
Kayda Kanoon. (1993) Every now and again I get an urge to watch one of these terrible, b-grade unsubbed actioners from the 90s, preferably with a certain martial artist and fortunately there's about a zillion of them on youtube with said martial artist. This one has Anupam Kher as an elderly pacifist whom the youtube synopsis implied was involved in India's fight for independence and who is constantly scolding the cowboy cop played by Sudesh Berry and the disgraced ex-cowboy cop played by Akshay Kumar. This is one of Akshay's better performances of the period; as usual he's inconsistent when it comes to selling the more overwrought emotions, but he handles the quietly angsty bits rather well, and the moments where he's quietly angry are perhaps scarier precisely because this isn't Ajay or Salman or one of those other guys who seem perpetually mad at the world on general principle. Paresh Rawal is mildly amusing/menacing as an evil Congress politician, although it's not really anything he hasn't done in about five hundred other movies from this period.
The fight choreography is terrible; the best thing you can say about the movie in that regard is that if one of their male leads is capable of pulling off a lunging jump several feet long and follow it up immediately with a high spin kick and a low sweep kick, the camera man is kind enough to show you the whole thing in slow motion without any cuts. Actually the camera work is pretty good in general, much better than the editing or the script-you don't need subtitles to tell that the latter is pretty stupid. The one thing I will say for the film, like a couple of the other vigilante movies I've seen from this period, it feels like there's a real sense of anger at how broken the system is; it doesn't feel like they're going through the motions in that regard. There's a very catchy item number towards the end of the movie, and although the women suffer pretty horribly the story treats them slightly better than is usual for this kind of thing. There's a minor villainess played by Aruna Irani; a rape victim who manages to escape from the baddies, kill Aruna's character in self-defense in the process, tell her boyfriend that REVENGE is not the answer, and proceeds to testify in court (not that it turns out well, this being a vigilante movie, but points for trying); and another rape victim who survives the experience and later gets to marry/become engaged to Akshay's character (admittedly, this is due at least in part to her being a lookalike for his late wife, whose death he's haunted by) and survives the movie.
The other interesting thing was how many lookalikes there were in the cast. Aswini Bhave, playing Akki's love interest(s) looks slightly like Parineeti Chopra from certain angles, especially when she smiles. There was a gunda who was a dead ringer for the old-timey stunt coordinator and bit player Shetty, who I'm pretty sure had passed away already by the early 90s, a corrupt cop who looked kind of like a clean-shaven Neeraj Pandey with eviller eyebrows, and a drug dealer who sort of looked like Shahrukh Khan, at least with sunglasses on. Second hero Sudesh Berry was apparently a tv star of the period, but he looked something like an older, heavier version of Siddarth Malhotra (the co-lead from Student of the Year) and had very similar mannerisms. It was weird.
The fight choreography is terrible; the best thing you can say about the movie in that regard is that if one of their male leads is capable of pulling off a lunging jump several feet long and follow it up immediately with a high spin kick and a low sweep kick, the camera man is kind enough to show you the whole thing in slow motion without any cuts. Actually the camera work is pretty good in general, much better than the editing or the script-you don't need subtitles to tell that the latter is pretty stupid. The one thing I will say for the film, like a couple of the other vigilante movies I've seen from this period, it feels like there's a real sense of anger at how broken the system is; it doesn't feel like they're going through the motions in that regard. There's a very catchy item number towards the end of the movie, and although the women suffer pretty horribly the story treats them slightly better than is usual for this kind of thing. There's a minor villainess played by Aruna Irani; a rape victim who manages to escape from the baddies, kill Aruna's character in self-defense in the process, tell her boyfriend that REVENGE is not the answer, and proceeds to testify in court (not that it turns out well, this being a vigilante movie, but points for trying); and another rape victim who survives the experience and later gets to marry/become engaged to Akshay's character (admittedly, this is due at least in part to her being a lookalike for his late wife, whose death he's haunted by) and survives the movie.
The other interesting thing was how many lookalikes there were in the cast. Aswini Bhave, playing Akki's love interest(s) looks slightly like Parineeti Chopra from certain angles, especially when she smiles. There was a gunda who was a dead ringer for the old-timey stunt coordinator and bit player Shetty, who I'm pretty sure had passed away already by the early 90s, a corrupt cop who looked kind of like a clean-shaven Neeraj Pandey with eviller eyebrows, and a drug dealer who sort of looked like Shahrukh Khan, at least with sunglasses on. Second hero Sudesh Berry was apparently a tv star of the period, but he looked something like an older, heavier version of Siddarth Malhotra (the co-lead from Student of the Year) and had very similar mannerisms. It was weird.
. I enjoyed this alot when I saw it on youtube about 12 months and some change back, but I'm afraid I was overly effusive about it on the old forums: parts of it are kind of appalling if you're not familiar with this type of 90s Bollywood film, and other parts are just flat out appalling period. (I mean, it's a movie about a woman who frames her boyfriend on a false charge of rape, complete with false flashbacks to the event.* It's a movie where the boyfriend fights and kills ugly bikini-clad female wrestlers in hand-to-hand combat. It's a movie where the heroine gets beat up by her boyfriend's uncle's goons without the boyfriend's knowledge because the uncle thinks she knows the location of a police informant. It's a movie where the boyfriend, extremely confused and upset by the framed-on-rape-charges thing, tracks her down to Canada, and slaps her and shakes her up by way of demanding an explanation.) So I have to apologize to anyone who saw this under the influence of anything I've ever said about it, and didn't enjoy the experience. 
Those of you who haven't seen it, please don't take anything I have said or will say as an endorsement or an encouragement to watch.
Since Sept. 6, 2022, Chiloka has not been reachable. (