Dabangg

Director: Abhinav Kashyap
Actors: Salman Khan, Sonakshi Sinha, Arbaaz Khan,Sonu Sood,Mahie Gill,Vinod Khanna,Dimple Kapadia,Om Puri,Anupam Kher,Tinu Anand,Mahesh Manjrekar,Amitosh Nagpal

If you kill me off, Chulbul 'Robinhood' Pandey warns a bunch of goons: “You serve 21 years in jail; thokai alag se (get thrashed separately).”

He says of himself, “Iss policewale ne agar thoka (If I bump you off instead), then promotion (for me); bahaduri ka medal alag se (bravery award comes separate).”

Mr Pandey is a policeman, of course. In the midst of a shootout and while chasing criminals, he never yet lets go of his sense of humour. A Bollywood ‘item song’ recurrently blasts out of a cellphone ring tone, from one of the goon's pockets. Pandey stops. He starts to gyrate to the song instead.

Dabangg This undisputed cop hero makes no bones about making black wealth from his uniformed job, openly pockets cash, stashes them in his mother's locker, answers politics with his own deceit, is still the hero, without any signs of redemption (unlike, say, Bachchan’s Shahenshah). He also lives for the moment he could literally tear his shirt off to finally reveal at the end, homoerotic biceps and a shaven, bare torso. The public will accept with open arms this hero, who's both naked and nakedly corrupt. The producers are convinced. Mainstream movies in that sense, aimed at what they call the masses, subtly confirm a truth or two about a disturbingly changing India. This is stuff for sociology!

Mr Pandey’s a super-hero in the tradition spawned by children’s cinema since the ‘70s (films of Bachchan, Dharmendra, thereafter Mithun, Devgan, Sunny Deol etc). Where the leading man serves for his audience poetic and vigilante justice in three hours flat. This one is merely two hours long. And for a change is relatively richly set, in the under-scaled, dark interiors of Uttar Pradesh.

Salman Khan, perhaps for the first time in his career, sports both a moustache to suggest his provincial maleness, and local accent to suit a lead role. He even stretches his stiff facial muscles occasionally to lend to his fans the rare grin; throws in the odd public service message on polio drops and religion in politics. He is but no underdog up against any system.

It’s difficult to figure what the hero is fighting for really, but his own self. This makes the villain (Sonu Sood) terribly weak; eventual salvation, deeply unsatisfying; plot, fairly pointless. But if you were in with the flow, I suppose, you wouldn’t care.

Salman’s puzzling swagger alone is probably what you walked in for. And this swinging pastiche is a whole lot less of a Bollywood bore than the super-star’s recent event pictures: Yuvraj, Wanted, London Dreams, Veer. The balance between soulless spoof and self-serious senselessness is also easier consumed here than similar attempts of the recent past (Tashan, Jhoom Barabar Jhoom). Each time, for instance, the camera swish-pans to a soap operatic scene, the filmmakers make sure to switch into a corny background score from the American Westerns! The genre remains untouched.

The music, largely inspired from Vishal Bhardwaj’s Omkara – title track, or the nautch number Munni Badnaam Hui (the new Bidi Jalaile) – it appears, comes with hoots and whistles as an inserted underlay. Something you suspect about scenes as well. The audience is suitably informed. The action is comically balletic, and when there’s no humour to complete the masala, standalone jokes play out before the screen. This is that epilogue-film-prologue, super-B movie, with reasonably A-budgets.It'd be a shame to watch this anywhere outside of an old, decrepit single screen theatre, in the spirit of the loud tribal tradition that Hindi movies have always been: severely light on both the brains and the wallet. Mad stuff! Really.

New Delhi, Sept. 10: Dabangg means fearless. Set in Laalgurj, Uttar Pradesh, this is a story of Chulbul Pandey (Salman Khan), a totally fearless but corrupt police officer with unorthodox working methods. But even the most fearless at times face a tough fight with their innermost demons. Chulbul has had a bitter childhood. His father passed away when he was very young after which his mother Naini (Dimple Kapadia) married Prajapati Pandey (Vinod Khanna). Together, they had a son Makhanchan (Arbaaz Khan).

Prajapati favours Makhanchan which does not go down well with Chulbul. He decides to take control of his destiny and detaches himself from his stepfather and half brother. His sole attachment is his mother. However after his mother's demise and an unsuccessful attempt to mend wounds, Chulbul snaps all ties with his stepfather and half brother. Rajo (Sonakshi Sinha) with her unique perspective of life enters his world and turns life upside down. Chulbul starts to see life more positively and also gets sensitised to the value of a family. But his detractors especially the dubious Cheddi Singh (Sonu Sood) have their own vested interests and emerge as spokes in the wheels, putting one brother against the other. Makhanchan ends up carrying out act oblivious to the consequences. When he realizes he has been used, he turns to Chulbul. Will Chulbul take his extended hand?

This then is "Dabangg". A world swarming with unit-dimensional characters who seem to know exactly which way the fists fly. We certainly don't. The comic book hero Chulbul Pandey, played with lip smacking pleasure by Salman Khan, shows up in every dingy warehouse in this mofussil town to settle scores, man to man.

"Dabangg" is the kind of old fashioned family drama combined with a vendetta saga that we thought had gone out of fashion in the 1980s. Chulbul Pandey could have been played by Amitabh Bachchan 30 years ago. Yes, that killing comic dimension that Salman brings into his characters has its roots in the Big B's action-comedy films. And Dimple Kapadia, wheezing, coughing, groaning and ranting her way through the mother's role (what got into Dimple) hams her way through this action drama where being opulently outrageous comes naturally to everyone. But all said and damned, there is something to be said about Salman's Chulbul Pandey's ability to be cartoonist, caricature and larger than life and yet warm and very real in his tongue-in-cheek bravura. Some of the less over-punctuated moments in this film of ceaseless bone-crunching sound-effects occur each time Chulbul woos his bulbul Rajjo (debutant Sonakshi Sinha). Each time she passes by Salman becomes putty in her hands. The debut ante has eyes that plead for peace. But who's listening? The raucous riotous soundtrack is slave only to the rhythm of blood gore and screams of innumerable goons crashing through wooden supports that have seen better days.

The action sequences are the backbone of this bone-breaking actioned. The stunts are done in an enticing mix of masti and mayhem. The crusted dusty-brown unwashed ambience is created with care. But the plot is almost completely free of delicate moments. "Dabangg" is Ram Gopal Varma's "Shool" on steroids. In "Shool" Manoj Bajpai was the honest cop on a cleansing spree in a Bihari backwater town. In "Dabangg" Salman takes on the mofussil mafia with much more humour than Bajpai could muster. It is the need of the hour. We have to laugh away the corruption and violence all around us. Salman does a splendid job of it. It's hard to tell where debut ant director Abhinav Kashyap's abilities end and the action director Vijayan Master begin. That seamless quality goes well with this unpunctuality tribute to the spirit of free-for-all one-oneupmanship.

An ear-catching music score by Sajid-Wajid does diminish the level of violence in the presentation. Sonakshi Sinha uses her eyes beautifully. And the song "Tere mast mast do nayan" describes her eloquent expressions well. But this is a Salman Khan vehicle all the way. He gets to be funny, wicked and belligerent. sometimes all at once. Sonu Sood as the main antagonist brings an in-your-face menace to his villainy.