Johnny Gaddaar, Bravo!

How often does it happen that an impulsive decision of yours to buy something or eat at some new restaurant or watch some movie that you don't know much about ends up in a positive payoff? Not all that often, at least in my case. And when it does, it feels great!

Something like that happened earlier in the evening today. A couple of friends and I decided to go to the city to watch Loins of Punjab Presents, a movie we had been hearing interesting things about. Manorama - Six Feet Under was removed today from the nearest multiplex. The catch was that the only show at the multiplex began at 8:20pm - a tad late for my friends, who had to be back at the campus a little early. We reached the place and the earliest show was for this new flick called Johnny Gaddaar - an admittedly curious name - which at least I knew very little about, except that it was made by the man who directed Ek Hasina Thi and 'starred' Dharmendra and Rimi Sen. While the first fact was a small positive for the movie, the second one was a huge huge negative. It took some amount of fortitude to decide to buy the tickets for the show.

There were two things that helped me decide in favor of watching it - one, the very different posters I have seen for the movie, which are more Sin City than Dus or Kaante in their appearance, and two, this really nice article that Sriram Raghavan, the director, had written for Rediff the other day. In the article he came across as a pretty intelligent guy with a passion for all sorts of movies.

So we went in.

The movie begins in black-and-white on a rainy night with a group of policemen in a van in Mumbai cracking crude jokes at the expense of one of their friends. It felt like the start of another of those unbearable B-grade movies that are not much good and not even as bad as a Kanti Shah masterpiece. But, things started to look up a moment later, when the camera casually shifted from the van to a car moving perpendicular to it. This, and an important plot point, was soon followed by one of the best credit sequences I have seen in any Hindi movie till date. And I was so relieved.

The basic plot of the movie revolves around this gang of five criminals - Dharmendra (Seshadri), Vinay Pathak (Prakash), Zakir Hussain (Shardul), Daya Shetty (Shiva), known mainly for the TV series CID, and Neil Nitin Mukesh (Vikram) - the 'hero' of the film. The gang plans, with the help of Govind Namdeo, an inspector and a friend of Seshadri's, some deal where they need an initial investment of Rs 2.5 crore (50 lakhs each - Rimi Sen, surprisingly enough, gets that division right). Things go wrong as they are wont to, the huge suitcase filled with the booty is stolen, and the rest of the movie is about the characters finding out who stole it and getting killed in the bargain. It is one of those suspense crime capers where the audience knows all along who the culprit is, but still sits on the edge of their seats trying to guess whether he'll be caught and how.

First, the negatives. The dialogue could have used a whole lot of better effort. It gets unintentionally corny on occasions, and Dharmendra has more than half of these. Of course, he doesn't do a great job in other scenes either. For some reason he is made to spout way too many English lines, and that is one of paaji's great weak-spots, maybe right next to dancing. At least one supporting cast member (Prakash's beautician wife) could have been replaced, in this case by someone less raucous. But the biggest spoil-sport was the ending. Will talk about it in a while.

Neil Nitin Mukesh, whose launch vehicle the film essentially is, and whom the camera lovingly takes into close focus several times, is a decent actor. He lacks terribly in terms of facial expressions or screen presence, but still manages his job well enough. Which points towards some degree of charisma somewhere in there. Rimi Sen, as usual, does not have much to do, and we should be thankful for that.

The best thing about the film is that it's uninhibitedly stylish. Some of the camera angles are to die for (and even though he hails from RGV's factory, stylish camera angles for him do not mean hand-held camera being rotated to induce nausea). There are a lot of references to great old films, both Hindi and American, as well as James Hadley Chase. The director is also an obvious fan of Tarantino and the Coens. The references do get a bit tiresome at times, but I am not complaining. And the style is not at the cost of the substance. It is a fairly taut thriller, rarely letting go of the pace. Based on the kind of conversations we got to listen to around us, I can say that the twists and turns of the story might not be easily comprehensible to every member of the audience. And how often does that happen in our times of simplified spoon-fed story lines?

The background score is interesting. But could have done with so much more.

Which brings me to the climax. The film does so many things right, has so many subtly delicious moments, that the ending was a huge disappointment to me and my friends. We were almost hoping for something to happen to make the film close to perfect, but that didn't happen and the film took the simpler way out. It almost looks like the director had a choice between a stylish ending and a simpler, easier ending, and he chose (or was forced to choose?) the latter.

But do not let that dissuade you from watching this film, if possible on the big screen. In our audi there were just three rows filled with people, and not completely, and I am expecting the case would be the same all over India. Which is a real shame, because so many lesser movies make so much more money simply because they have the right names. This is one of those films I would have surely given a miss had it come to our LAN, but I know better now. This is a director I'll be on the lookout for in the future, and I hope he does not give in to the baser demands of the business he is in.