20 Years of Kaante EXCLUSIVE: “Tanuj Garg used to review for the Afternoon newspaper. He gave my film half a star and his last line was ‘I am giving half a star to this movie because it’s Christmas season and I am in a festive mood’” – Sanjay Gupta

By Fenil Seta -

December 22, 2022 - 4:00 PM IST

The unconventional yet highly commercial thriller, Kaante, completed 20 years on December 20. The film was a huge success commercially and even critically, it got acclaim from the critics. During an exclusive interaction with Bollywood Hungama about Kaante’s 20th anniversary, Sanjay Gupta opened up about a particularly negative review of his film, written by Tanuj Garg.

20 Years of Kaante EXCLUSIVE: “Tanuj Garg used to review for the Afternoon newspaper. He gave my film half a star and his last line was ‘I am giving half a star to this movie because it’s Christmas season and I am in a festive mood’” – Sanjay Gupta

Sanjay Gupta told Bollywood Hungama, “Most of the critics gave good reviews. But there was one critic, Tanuj Garg, who used to write for the Afternoon newspaper. He gave my film half a star and his last line was ‘I am giving half a star to this movie because it’s Christmas season and I am in a festive mood’. What he meant was that if he was not in a festive mood, he would have not even given the film half a star!”

Sanjay Gupta continued, “There’s a picture of George Lucas on the sets of the second or third Star Wars. He’s wearing a T-Shirt on which the last four lines of a negative review of Star Wars’ first part by LA Times is mentioned. They had ripped apart the film. Their grouse was that the film had lousy acting, a poor story and that it was a complete waste of time. The way George Lucas made a T-shirt out of it, I am going to do the same. ‘I am in a festive mood – Tanuj Garg’ will be mentioned on my T-Shirt. Yeh T-shirt main banaunga hi banaunga! At the back of the T-shirt, I’ll mention Kaante’s glowing review by Sight N Sound, the most literary film magazine in the world. They had written ‘This film far surpasses Reservoir Dogs’. Moreover, they compared me to my gurus like Tony Scott and Ridley Scott and said in terms of look, my film is at par with the films of these filmmakers. And mind you, their films were made even then at $80-90 million. My film was not even made at $3 million!”

THIS IS BY FAR THE COOLEST COOLEST T-SHIRT WORN BY A DIRECTOR EVER!!! https://t.co/iGjJvTPk4d
— Sanjay Gupta (@_SanjayGupta) November 23, 2022

Tanuj Garg is currently an established producer and co-founder of Ellipsis Entertainment along with Atul Kasbekar. They have made films like Neerja (2016), Tumhari Sulu (2017), Why Cheat India (2019) and Looop Lapeta (2022).

Directed by Sanjay Gupta, Kaante starred Amitabh Bachchan, Sanjay Dutt, Suniel Shetty, Kumar Gaurav, Mahesh Manjrekar and Lucky Ali.

Also Read: 20 Years of Kaante EXCLUSIVE: Sanjay Gupta REVEALS the CRAZY audience reaction he witnessed in Chandan cinema: “When audiences heard dialogues like ‘Big Boobs Rosy’ and ‘iski biwi ke saath tha’, they went BONKERS kyunki unhone pehle kabhi aisa kuch suna hi nahin tha kisi film mein”