One can always trust an I-want-to-be-different-for-the-heck-of-it director to take crassness, vulgarity and insensitivity to the next level and then to the level lower than that again and again. For India is a big enough country, where a group of audiences big enough to endorse financial success of such directors can also strengthen the faith of such directors in their ability to shock audiences with gratuitous and undesirable audacity.
Anurag Kashyap is a pseudo-intellectual, who in reality is no more than a shrewd Hollywood Production House, where scripts are developed keeping a target audience in mind. He very well understands that Black-societies of Bihar, UP and the so called Hindi Belt, where people still live in dark-ages of sensibility. This movie essentially targets that market of viewers. Safe bet indeed, where if the multiplexes give a tepid response to this macabre, senseless, emotionally-medival movie, single-screens in small towns, where his target audience lives will set the cash registers ringing. He is NO Raj Kapoor, Guru Dutt or Yash Chopra who used to make movies which excited THEM and made their creative juices flow.
In film after film that have come out of Mumbai, Biharis and U.Pites have been shown as people from dark ages, who are insensitive, cruel, crime-orientated, living in cities dirtier and murkier than sewers. If the claps and cat calls in a PVR on MG Road Gurgaon and the success of rotten tomatoes like Ishaqzade are anything to go by, then one can assume that Biharis and UPites really do NOT mind such stereotyping.
Coming to the movie. It is a senseless concoction of brutal violence, vulgar comic situations and a story which has been beaten to death by the likes of RGV and his proteges. I am sure many of Anurag Kashyap's ilk will try putting various labels on it - they will call it a "true to life" portrayal of what REAL India lives and breathes everyday.
Film-festivals will shower this movie with accolades, because for imperialistic snobbery, it is corroboration of its deep-seated belief that India is all about crime, primitiveness and violence of thought and of action. A lagaan, hence, is not good enough for them while A Slaam Bombay or A Slumdog is. A few emancipated women (who are more keen on proving to the world that they are emancipated than they are on relishing the fruit of intellectual emancipation) will come on national TV screaming their lungs out on how in a democracy THEY have the right to choose what they watch and what they find entertaining. I do NOT want to get into an argument with their coterie, I simply want to repeat that this movie deserves to end in the gutter that it is about.
Actors have done a brilliant job, notwithstanding some blatant miscasts. Manoj Bajpai has always been theatrical in his expression, which thing he has largely curbbed in his portrayal of Sardar Khan in this movie. One can not take away the credit of a sterling performance from him just because the movie is cheap.
NOT recommended for anyone who likes good entertainment in the company of his friends and family or alone.
Rating - 2 gutters out of 5 sewers.
