Post by odadune on May 10, 2015 4:48:13 GMT
here's Moviemavengal's take from letterboxd: letterboxd.com/moviemavengal/film/gabbar-is-back/
I'm not going to bother linking to mainstream reviews; suffice it to say that the "critics" who praise everything found positive things to say about it, and most other people were scathing about the film overall but went comparatively easy on the cast (with the exception of Shruti, who took more flak than I think she deserved).
I missed out on a chance to see this last weekend, but the gigantic multiplex I go to a couple of times a year to see Indian films on the big screen kept it around for a second week, and I talked the More Casual Fan into an excursion to shop and drop me off at the movie theater.
I enjoyed it because it gave me a lot of what I'd hoped for when I first saw the South Indian versions: an atmospheric, vaguely gothic story with Akshay swaggering around brooding on his Tragic Past and destroying evildoers, without the film losing sight of what the penalty is for people taking law into their own hands. The fight scenes are well-done. Akki is a great mixture of stoic, vulnerable and charming, with his sad-beagle eyes and expressive body language doing a lot of the work for him. The comedian Sunil Grover is really quite good in a mostly serious role as a lowly police constable trying to catch Gabbar in between serving samosas to his fat slob boss. It's not as sexist as a lot of these films; it ditches the crude fanservicey intro that the heroine got in the original, and the racy item number is something going on in the background of the villain's birthday party-we don't have to deal with something like Party All Night from Boss, where the two heroes whoop it up with a river of alcohol and 50+ scantily clad women. There's no rape or sexual violence against women. As a bonus, it's also fast-paced (nearly 50 minutes shorter than Ramanaa, the original Tamil film) and quite funny, in a rather dry way.
The fast pace comes with a price however. In Ramanaa, the young woman who hangs out with the main character serves several functions: she's eye candy, she's (part of the) comic relief, her largely unrequited interest in the hero reassures his "mass" audience that the actor hasn't lost his "mojo," and she's both a standin for the audience gradually learning about the main character and an example of the young people who are supposedly galvanized by his crusade against corruption. Here Shruti Hassan (as Shruti) is...eye candy and sort of comic relief, although most of the laughs actually come from Akshay (as Aditya/Gabbar) either trolling her or reacting to her; Shruti's not bad at comedy but she's also not the perfectly matched sparring partner that Sonakshi was in Rowdy Rathore and Holiday. The sort-of romance track is deliberately ambiguous: there's an Aditya/Shruti song picturization which is just surreal enough to be an obvious fantasy sequence and not quite surreal enough to be all that interesting to watch, and there's Aditya joking about kissing her goodbye at the end of the movie just before his hanging, and just about everything in between has her schmoozing him or sassing him and him seeming more amused by her than interested in her. (When she brings him along to a friend's wedding, he basically has flashbacks to his romance with Kareena Kapoor's character, which doesn't seem like the action of a man falling in love a second time.) It ain't Charade, or To Catch a Thief (two movies Akshay and the Khans should watch repeatedly and make their pet directors watch, just so they can get a feel for better May/October romances), but for a subplot in an action-masala thriller, it will do.
There are also some confusing bits in the main plot. The promos show a scene of Gabbar executing one of his victims, showing that he does this himself rather than delegating to his network of allies (the equivalent scene in Ramanaa has the victim basically being mob-lynched by the main guy's network). The version in the finished film cuts away before the execution, and leaves it unclear who does the executing. At a point in the plot when the main villain (Suman Talwar) knows that his old enemy Aditya is still alive but doesn't yet know that Aditya is "Gabbar", scourge of corrupt bureaucrats, the villain captures and terrorizes some of Gabbar's allies (apparently using the same intel that the police are using to arrest Gabbar's suspected allies) and when one of Gabbar's allies winds up dead, Aditya goes after the villain. The way the film is edited, it's not clear how much cooperation the villain is getting from the police, and it's very easy to breeze past the fact that, from a practical POV, Aditya/Gabbar can't afford to have his enemies using his own terror tactics against him, and to instead assume he's going after the baddie in revenge for either the friend's death or the much earlier death of Aditya's pregnant wife.
The film's other weak points include its music (pleasant but generic songs, overly repetitive background score), the decision to have one of the fittest men in Bollywood gain weight for an action role (it's not obvious in most scenes, but when it is, it's not appealing), and the bland villain. Suman does what is expected of him-hold up his half of the action scenes, gloat and snarl and look unpleasant, while making it clear that his character is a hollow man, little more than an empty mask. From what I've seen of the director's other movies, he's just not very interested in true sociopaths and psychopaths, he's much more interested in good people trying to do the right thing, or flawed people doing dubious things for understandable reasons. It's not surprising that Akshay's character is a kaleidoscope of menace, humor, angst and pseudo-philosophy while Suman's is defined by the fact that he can confront a crowd full of people wearing masks with his face and seem every bit as fake as the crowd of faces looking back at him.
The final stretch of the film, where Aditya is happier and more playful about his upcoming execution than he's been about anything since his wife died, is a love it or hate it kind of thing-people seem to either think it's the best part of the movie, or find it infuriating. Definitely an impressive piece of acting and editing, but there's something needling and provocative about the net effect (particularly the last few seconds, involving a politically incorrect line from Sholay and an abrupt cut to black), that I can't put my finger on.
I don't believe that this film is essential viewing, but then again, I tend to be agnostic about the idea of "essential" or "canonical" or "must-see" films in general. If you like Akshay Kumar or Sunil Grover, and aren't put off by the whole "revenge fantasy with side order of social satire" aspects of the story, this is a great chance to see both those gentlemen doing something different from their usual schtick. (Especially if, like me, you've been waiting for a long time to see Akki to do a nice brooding, tortured hero with a bit of humor on the side). If you like vigilante/rogue hero stories of the Shankar/Murgadoss school, you would probably find this interesting.
I'm not going to bother linking to mainstream reviews; suffice it to say that the "critics" who praise everything found positive things to say about it, and most other people were scathing about the film overall but went comparatively easy on the cast (with the exception of Shruti, who took more flak than I think she deserved).
I missed out on a chance to see this last weekend, but the gigantic multiplex I go to a couple of times a year to see Indian films on the big screen kept it around for a second week, and I talked the More Casual Fan into an excursion to shop and drop me off at the movie theater.
I enjoyed it because it gave me a lot of what I'd hoped for when I first saw the South Indian versions: an atmospheric, vaguely gothic story with Akshay swaggering around brooding on his Tragic Past and destroying evildoers, without the film losing sight of what the penalty is for people taking law into their own hands. The fight scenes are well-done. Akki is a great mixture of stoic, vulnerable and charming, with his sad-beagle eyes and expressive body language doing a lot of the work for him. The comedian Sunil Grover is really quite good in a mostly serious role as a lowly police constable trying to catch Gabbar in between serving samosas to his fat slob boss. It's not as sexist as a lot of these films; it ditches the crude fanservicey intro that the heroine got in the original, and the racy item number is something going on in the background of the villain's birthday party-we don't have to deal with something like Party All Night from Boss, where the two heroes whoop it up with a river of alcohol and 50+ scantily clad women. There's no rape or sexual violence against women. As a bonus, it's also fast-paced (nearly 50 minutes shorter than Ramanaa, the original Tamil film) and quite funny, in a rather dry way.
The fast pace comes with a price however. In Ramanaa, the young woman who hangs out with the main character serves several functions: she's eye candy, she's (part of the) comic relief, her largely unrequited interest in the hero reassures his "mass" audience that the actor hasn't lost his "mojo," and she's both a standin for the audience gradually learning about the main character and an example of the young people who are supposedly galvanized by his crusade against corruption. Here Shruti Hassan (as Shruti) is...eye candy and sort of comic relief, although most of the laughs actually come from Akshay (as Aditya/Gabbar) either trolling her or reacting to her; Shruti's not bad at comedy but she's also not the perfectly matched sparring partner that Sonakshi was in Rowdy Rathore and Holiday. The sort-of romance track is deliberately ambiguous: there's an Aditya/Shruti song picturization which is just surreal enough to be an obvious fantasy sequence and not quite surreal enough to be all that interesting to watch, and there's Aditya joking about kissing her goodbye at the end of the movie just before his hanging, and just about everything in between has her schmoozing him or sassing him and him seeming more amused by her than interested in her. (When she brings him along to a friend's wedding, he basically has flashbacks to his romance with Kareena Kapoor's character, which doesn't seem like the action of a man falling in love a second time.) It ain't Charade, or To Catch a Thief (two movies Akshay and the Khans should watch repeatedly and make their pet directors watch, just so they can get a feel for better May/October romances), but for a subplot in an action-masala thriller, it will do.
There are also some confusing bits in the main plot. The promos show a scene of Gabbar executing one of his victims, showing that he does this himself rather than delegating to his network of allies (the equivalent scene in Ramanaa has the victim basically being mob-lynched by the main guy's network). The version in the finished film cuts away before the execution, and leaves it unclear who does the executing. At a point in the plot when the main villain (Suman Talwar) knows that his old enemy Aditya is still alive but doesn't yet know that Aditya is "Gabbar", scourge of corrupt bureaucrats, the villain captures and terrorizes some of Gabbar's allies (apparently using the same intel that the police are using to arrest Gabbar's suspected allies) and when one of Gabbar's allies winds up dead, Aditya goes after the villain. The way the film is edited, it's not clear how much cooperation the villain is getting from the police, and it's very easy to breeze past the fact that, from a practical POV, Aditya/Gabbar can't afford to have his enemies using his own terror tactics against him, and to instead assume he's going after the baddie in revenge for either the friend's death or the much earlier death of Aditya's pregnant wife.
The film's other weak points include its music (pleasant but generic songs, overly repetitive background score), the decision to have one of the fittest men in Bollywood gain weight for an action role (it's not obvious in most scenes, but when it is, it's not appealing), and the bland villain. Suman does what is expected of him-hold up his half of the action scenes, gloat and snarl and look unpleasant, while making it clear that his character is a hollow man, little more than an empty mask. From what I've seen of the director's other movies, he's just not very interested in true sociopaths and psychopaths, he's much more interested in good people trying to do the right thing, or flawed people doing dubious things for understandable reasons. It's not surprising that Akshay's character is a kaleidoscope of menace, humor, angst and pseudo-philosophy while Suman's is defined by the fact that he can confront a crowd full of people wearing masks with his face and seem every bit as fake as the crowd of faces looking back at him.
The final stretch of the film, where Aditya is happier and more playful about his upcoming execution than he's been about anything since his wife died, is a love it or hate it kind of thing-people seem to either think it's the best part of the movie, or find it infuriating. Definitely an impressive piece of acting and editing, but there's something needling and provocative about the net effect (particularly the last few seconds, involving a politically incorrect line from Sholay and an abrupt cut to black), that I can't put my finger on.
I don't believe that this film is essential viewing, but then again, I tend to be agnostic about the idea of "essential" or "canonical" or "must-see" films in general. If you like Akshay Kumar or Sunil Grover, and aren't put off by the whole "revenge fantasy with side order of social satire" aspects of the story, this is a great chance to see both those gentlemen doing something different from their usual schtick. (Especially if, like me, you've been waiting for a long time to see Akki to do a nice brooding, tortured hero with a bit of humor on the side). If you like vigilante/rogue hero stories of the Shankar/Murgadoss school, you would probably find this interesting.