SARKAR BASHING


Readers of my blog will know that I am not a fan of the Bachchans and this post unfortunately isn’t going to be any different. It also has movie spoilers so if you haven’t wathed it don’t read further. Not that it matters too much because no plot twist is ‘surprising’ in any way.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not totally biased. The performances of the Bachchan trio are pretty good. Amitabh the best followed by Junior and even Ash is adequate in a role that is quite frankly, pretty underdeveloped and very badly written.

The problem, as in all RGV films, is with the supporting cast. In any movie about Good and Bad the ‘Hero’ can only be as good as the ‘Villains’ and sadly in this movie they are all caricatures.

Not one of them is cast/played as anything more than a buffoon.

Hassan Qazi speaks about breaking eggs and making omelets like it were some profound philosophy.
The politician is portrayed as such a slob and dumbass that even by the Laloo-Mayawati standard, it is a wonder he even got elected as an MLA much less made a Deputy CM.
The other character keeps correcting people to pronounce his name as Vora not Vohra and if that were not irritating enough he sings songs before delivering bad dialogues.
Then there is the assassin who is apparently dumb and only communicates with gloved fingered gestures and who could have come straight from a D-grade flick.
And finally the Gandhian character is painted with such broad white strokes initially that you know he is going to be the surprise bad guy in the end.

Shot in extreme close ups the weird camera placement (under a table, behind a coffee mug, between fingers etc) is initially novel but 10 minutes into the movie the novelty quickly gives way to irritation. Amitabh gains from this and it is simply because his face is so emotive that in the extreme close up he can convey so much with just a flicker of a muscle. Ash is so pretty you cant go wrong wherever you place the camera. Abhishek unfortunately is not the best looking bloke in town and while his rugged charm may work in other movies his flabby face in extreme close up is quite disturbing. And quite frankly, male grooming debate aside, when the director begins placing the camera 2 inches from your face investing in some lip-balm is not a bad idea.

And as Raja Sen rightly pointed out, no one in this movie actually speaks. They just deliver dialogues. So much so that after a while you almost feel like Confucius and Khalil Gibran are locked in a room playing a game of one-upmanship. Tedious!

Now I have never been shot or even been near a shooting before but basic logic would dictate, I think, that when you are in the balcony being hit by sniper fire, you duck. Simple. Yet no one does so.

Ash’s role is so badly written that initially she is the fiercely independent business-woman who says she does not like the word impossible and yet throughout the movie she seems to have no problem being turned down and when AB Jr is getting hit by sniper fire, lover or no lover, the simple rules of self-preservation dictates that you run or hide or duck or whatever but definitely not what Ash does. She screams “Stop It, Stop It” like some churlish school teacher trying to control a boorish class. And for a CEO of a major international company she quite inexplicably becomes an almost full time resident at the Sarkar residence. Its no wonder her father did not trust her with his company.

There are some good scenes like the one where Father and Son are trying to come to grips with the killing of the elder son or the scene where the Rao fellow gets his comeuppance but they are too little to save this movie.

Finally in the penultimate scene, Sarkar is seen reflected in his dead son’s portrait talking to him about life and as he finishes his dialogue-bazi his face goes out of focus while Abhishek’s comes into focus and then you notice that for a character who is shown to be pretty straightforward and brash in life, his picture is a studio one, posed and airbrushed to perfection.

And like that picture, something about the movie is not quite right.