I generally try to avoid feeling
depressed while writing about a movie, especially when it's a brainless,
un-classy, humourless piece of festering crud that stars not only the
thoroughly-unthreatening Prakash Raj as a villain but also has him seducing
Mahie Gill by scratching his chest and murmuring "Meeowww Meeeoowww".
Why classic films like Zanjeer
get remade into slushy puddles of horse manure is an inexplicable phenomenon,
much like alchemy – except in this case gold becomes trash instead of the other
way round. To those who counter Zanjeer's lack of intelligence with the ready
advice of, "Hey it’s a masala movie so turn off your brain and
enjoy", I don’t have a switch to just turn my brain off. If I did, maybe
I’d be make a film like Zanjeer instead of writing about it.
Zanjeer is not just a bad film,
it is proof of a filmmaker who is barely even trying. To say this remake
defecates upon the legacy of the original film would be giving it too much
credit. The film doesn’t waste any time in establishing its terribleness –
while the 1973 original opened with a gritty scene at a police station,
Lakhia’s remake opens with a wannabe James Bond number with females clad in
S&M costumes, lasciviously touching chains (to modernise the Zanjeer
innuendo) and writhing in orgasmic pleasure. In the original Amitabh Bachchan
makes a low key entry as he wakes up from a nightmare (he probably dreamed
about Priyanka Chopra in the remake, but more on that later). In this film, our
hero Ram Charan makes an entry with a large establishing shot of his dad
Chiranjeevi and beats up gundas as 'Raghupati Raghav Raja Ram' blares in the
background. People look on, nodding their heads to the rhythm and applauding.
Yeah, real subtle.
Lakhia isn’t interested
respecting Prakash Mehra; he is just hell bent on assaulting the audience with
an endless array of cheap jokes, gratuitous violence, generic item songs,
unpleasant characters in garish costumes and a deluge of bad acting. In one
scene, Prakash Raj licks his lips and says "Chicken and chicks are the two
meows of life". In another, a little boy at a hospital asks a policeman,
"Uncle mere daddy kahan gaye?", despite his daddy lying next to him,
burnt to char. This film is not merely cacophonous; it is spiteful, as if
Lakhia wants to lace the cartoonish 'Simbly South' style of Rohit Shetty with
the smutty Mumbaiyya masala of Sanjay Gupta. As a result, the tone of Zanjeer
wavers from dreadfully unimaginative to smugly lazy.
When the director makes no effort
to make an interesting movie, one relies on the actors to compensate. Sadly the
talent on that front is equally abysmal. Ram Charan, a superstar in the South,
achieves the impossible feat of being even more wooden than John Abraham. The
guy’s facial muscles are so tightly attached, his eyelids would close if he
scratched his cheek.
If you thought Priyanka Chopra
couldn’t do anything more embarrassing than Exotic, you’re in for a real
surprise. She plays a rich NRI who flies to India to attend a Facebook friend’s
wedding, does an item number at said wedding and becomes the surrogate wife of
a police officer she meets a day later. She does bubbly, she does Pinky, she
does slapstick, she does quirky and she does cute, all at once. Maybe her
character is a parable of the human condition, or an allegory of psychic
intervention, or social commentary regarding the existence of bipolar serial
killers breeding in our midst. I have no idea.
What is most annoying about
Zanjeer is that it's a filthy leech of a movie that simply uses the rights it
owns and absolutely desecrates the sanctity of the original. Lakhia goes so far
as to use the late journalist J Dey as a character and caricaturises him.
Because that’s what a crime journalist who chronicled the underworld and
eventually paid for with his life deserves – a mockery of his life's work,
Bollywood-style.
(First published in Firstpost)
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