Murder 2 : Dark and just Stupid

I am not a fan of Emraan Hashmi, or Mohit Suri, and for that matter any director with Bhatt as a surname. I respect them as good businessmen although. There concept is simple, take any foreign movie which can qualify as a thriller, put some weird characters, chop off sequences which are not acceptable to Indian audiences and change them according to Indian ethos, it may however happen that now the story has become illogical, so put up an unwanted hot actress on the screenplay to kick the reasoning out of men watching the movie. In the process you may have sucked the soul of the movie, but who cares. And you have a product ready at the expense of 7-8 crores, with mediocre actors who are available on daily wages. End result is profit. And just to clarify there is no link between this movie and Murder 1, barring a same irritating Emraan Hashmi and a song which is uttered by a character few times in the movie.

Murder 2 doesn’t go far from the above stated thoughts. The movie is dominated by violence, not the kind where you see a lot of blood shed, but where you are constantly haunted by the ugliness of the dark and dirty corners of the characters. The director has left on important part of the story without proper justification, and that part is character development, all the character looks and behaves unreal, granted the villain is a psycho, but what caused him to become one, the back ground story is simply not sufficient. Same is the case with the characterization of hero, he is having a sad past, just because every hero in a dark movie is supposed to be having one, even why he left the job of police is not very convincing; it’s explained in a single dialogue, where the hero says he wanted to earn a lot of illegal money, but my dear friend, who in India is to believe that police man doesn’t earn loads of illegal money, and by remaining in the police he would have much more opportunities to earn as well. Now all that was needed was a heroine with a sad past as well, so we again have a one line explanation by heroine about some crap that happened with her mother. So all that is left in the world of her is to drink like a fish and shed clothes.

Now there are a number of girls who are missing from Goa, and police is desperate to catch the culprit, however when they get hold of him suddenly they are under pressure by the government to conceal the information from public, but why and how does it even     helps anybody other than the killer is not revealed, maybe it was the only way to convince the hero to become the savior, even a honest policeman confesses to him that he is the only man in the whole town to do something as the police is in a holiday mood for one week, even when the police becomes convinced that the killer is caught for the above murders, suddenly a couple of politicians comes to rescue for no apparent reason, and police even leaves a serial killer on just a telephone call, brilliant just brilliant.

The only saving grace of the movie is the performance of Prashant Narainan, rest all are just ok too just pathetic.

Watch the movie if you don’t have anything else to do.

Rating **

The Hero is Back

The Hero is Back

There was a time when anything was possible, not in real life, but in Bollywood, Hero fighting 100 bad guys in one go and still winning, stopping the ticking bomb in time to save his family just by deciding which wire to cut ‘yellow or red’, escaping from prison without planning, surviving even after being hit by a dozen of bullets, like those bullets were his Sunday cereal breakfast.

But slowly these became a thing of the past and Indian hero started becoming more realistic in his nature. He became a salesman in Rocketsingh with a target to sale more computers. He became a bank manager in DTBHJ with a mid life crises where he is not able to woo a young girl, because of his age. He became an executive in a big cola company in Corporate, where he is thrown out of the window to die, when he started to raise questions which were dangerous for his organization.

His perpetual power to survive and fight the injustice, and win in the end of course, was slowly sucked out of him by the very writers who once upon a time gave him the above mentioned dreams. This happened partially due to the focus of film makers on the business generated by multiplexes. The usual audiences were educated, used to raise questions over the logic of movie all the time and a lot of them had exposure to Hollywood movies as well. So it was inevitable to change the concept of hero.

But one thing was forgotten, the audiences of the single screen, who wanted their share of dishum- dishum from a hero. They desperately wanted their hero to win in every battle he participated, they wanted the heroine to have no other options and come and fall in the strong shoulders of our mighty hero, and killing the hero was like worshiping the devil.

Enters Salman Khan with ‘Wanted’, a smash hit, where he played a ‘know all – seen all – done all’ kind of a guy. He came, He saw and He concurred. He brought with him the old larger than life kind of persona which was lost in the era of realism like Titanic was lost in ocean.

Taking the clue from it every Bollywood hero started becoming Rajnikant in his own style. Salman repeated this strategy with Dabang. But best hand was played by the makers of Buddha hoga tera baap, watching Amitabh Bachchan in that charming character, where he smashes every bone of every villain while uttering most tongue and cheek dialogues, and dances with videshi gories while flirting with Raveena Tandon and Romancing with Hema Malini. It was just the kind of movie a Bachchan fan can’t afford to miss. Even with a average director and a script which needed trimming and a good editor, the movie is entertaining for the families, the 2 scenes where Amithabh talks with Hema Malini makes you realize that even a bad director can’t make these two legends act bad.

However in coming weeks we are going to witness more raw action in the form of ‘Singham’ and then ‘Force’. It looks the macho is back and the party has just begin.