Agneepath

[Reflection]

AGNEEPATH
Mandwa, Kancha and Barwah
Ultraviolent Vendetta

Director: Karan Malhotra
Cast: Sanjay Dutt, Rishi Kapoor, Hrithik Roshan, Priyank Chopra, Om Puri
Review By: Dr Usman Latif Khawja
I am not surprised neither shocked just bemused over the remake capacity of Bollywood as this time they took a 90s revenge melodrama to turn it into a mock parade with a super star medley from seventies to present era, and guess what it still stinks with ennui every inch of the way.

So there is an evil crime lord or baron in a town called Mandwa near Bombay and his name is Kancha and he specialises in mob lynching all his foes on a sacred bargad tree which sits right on the edge of the Arabian sea on a bare rocky cliff in a miracle of natural ecstasy, and Kancha is just as bereft of scalp hair as is the bargad tree of any leaves, incidentally Kancha is a fat hog of a fuming fiend played by Sanjay Dutt in an unfriendly appearance as ever, he virtually beats everyone to a pulp of the tree in his terrain or he has them stabbed with every kind of knife available from Mexico city to Miami to Mumbai, but occasionally they use guns when the action manager runs out of other options and that handicap haunts this movie in every frame where all the fiends stand and stare at each other whilst waiting to fire at each other while axes swords hatchets and daggers are all flying in frantic frenzy all around in mayhem and how anyone can survive that for 30 seconds is a mystery but this movie runs for just about 3 hours.

Those three hours are about a daring young boy Vijay whose dad is a very honest and very sacred teacher lynched by Kancha in Mandwa because Vijay was naughty and now Vijay lives in Bombay where he is schooled into being a crime boss by a Muslim mafia man called Rauf Lala, who is the monarch of Mumbai mafia and he can sell any Indian girl of any age in auction in open day Bombay studio stages to anyone from Arabs to African negroes without a hiccough while Indian cops just seem to huff and puff and one just wonders whether this really is an alpha city or some village in Congo.

Incidentally it is Rishi Kapoor who plays this role of the pious Muslim man who wants to export all Indian women to Arabian peninsula and he fumes and he frets and he still does not frighten either the females or the boy from Mandwa who wants his crime crown for his own and he must go to Mandwa to get Kancha to destroy Lala Rauf.

The rest is obvious Vijay has just one motive in life to hang Kancha from the damned prop of a bad tree gone wrong in Mandwa (oh that tree), and of course he will but you shall wait three bloody hours literally to watch that happen and those three hours are a rip roaring melodrama with every mother sister and tearful women in India thrown in this excessively vulgar pot-boiler and when you don’t have a weeping woman you have an army of screaming skirmishing criminals who never talk, but shout and harangue even in bedrooms like they are in a wall street boardroom and if that was not enough they all want to kill everyone and it takes a million light years to accomplish the murders with mangled knives which they plunge in serious malign into each other’s belly’s and chests and still the victims keep looking and breathing and staring at the camera for another million years holding their guns in their hands while the knives are at work on their viscera as if they are intensely in the middle of a nirvana itself like the bargad tree.

Somehow in the middle of this mess we get a breather when Katrina Kaif in a very friendly appearance comes to sing an ever so friendly song to Kancha and the boy from Bombay who is now in Mandwa to seek his life's dream to kill Kancha, but Kancha wants Vijay to see an item song before he lets him fulfil his greatest desire, so miss Kaif wears a bare choli with a sparse dhoti and looks truly sensuous and sizzling with a daru bottle slung on her hips and entertains the intense looking constipated Vijay with her hip gyrations in a huge epic bonanza I wonder if they conceived the song before the movie itself for though it is vulgar it is entertaining unlike the rest of this gratuitous mess both excessively vulgar and emotionally bereft in the most bizarre melodrama I have seen in ages.

The performances are hysterically funny as everyone is suffering in every scene except for Vijay’s love interest played by Priyanka Chopra who smiles and walks on his arm in song after song.

Vijay himself either smiles or cries when he doesn’t have a knife in hand or is running at an enemy in a two expression act while Sanjay Dutt does his best to evoke his Khalnayak image in recurrence but he has tons of fat weighed by another ton of silver jewellery he wears to make certain he is a Indian crime baron from Mandwa and there are all kind of metaphors to make him into a Raavan while Vijay is Lord Rama in every prediction gone awry, in the end he only manages to look like a pimp or barwa from mandwa and that is saying the least.

Vijay has a profoundly whining young sister and a very irritating mother who look straight out of the worst Indian melodramas made from the trashiest movies in seventies or eighties and they consume all the glycerine and sobbing that is available between Mumbai and mandwa in every mile to meander and they crop up in every action sequence out of nowhere thanks to Aladdin and his magic lamp.

As for the action it is hilarious as the camera just runs itself out of breath or stays fixed as everyone is being stabbed like it got transfixed by its own lambasting shock to death and it has red stamped all over it with yellow mixes in colour compositions.

These movies are a shame for Bollywood and I noted that the foreign press and international critics who even review Bodyguard have not even given a note to this disgusting Indian mas
Sala vendetta despite it being a top production and that speaks volumes.

If Indians knew how to make action vendettas like Deewar Zanjeer or Sholay, this is sheer evidence they have totally forgotten how to do that today and this foul gutter of a movie needs to be seen to be believed ,and yes thank the lord for 'chikni chameli' or this was the most boring blunder I have suffered for the past year and I hope miss Kaif got paid her dues for her wholesome anatomical endeavours minus any clothes in mandwa which makes the 'choli ke peeche' song look like a purist's delight and that is an understatement.


Rating: ONE STAR