Movie: Gunday
Director: Abbas Ali Zafar
Cast: Ranveer Singh, Arjun Kapoor, Irrfan Khan and Priyanka Chopra
Rating: **1/2
As much as you brace yourself with the fact that Gunday’s bag of tricks are as outdated as its poster designs resembling Sholay, you can’t help but appreciate Abbas Ali Zafar’s intricate care to portray the raw equation between its lead characters Bikram and Bala, the contemporary Jai-Veeru in this outing set around the West Bengal backdrop of the late 80′s. They are an on-screen testimony to the old adage ‘Two bodies, one soul’ usually associated with a couple, with their disturbed past giving them little choice to take up any profession but for being the Bhai’s of Kolkata, sorry, Calcutta and making a mess of the system and rather be it instead.
Though the 1971 Bengal division issue isn’t quite a territory that filmmakers have often explored in the past, in Gunday, it helps the maker establish a firm premise, i.e. more or so the need of two refugees to break-free of the law-created shackles. One of them slaps a refugee mocking canteen-shop owner for throwing him off his job for breaking a set of tea glasses and tells him to take this as a reminder to not mete out the same treatment to any child ever again. The former is the aggressor who is driven by emotion and another one, the ideal between the two wants to use his mind to outplay people. One wants to live in the topmost floor of a surreal palace while you rather smile at the reply of the other when he utters, “I want to live in your heart.”
But sadly, the promise doesn’t last beyond this phase. All this paves way to an interior that we have witnessed many a time before. Yes, you should agree that their flirtatious nature with the cabaret dancer Nandita, the part donned by Priyanka Chopra manages to infuse some infectious energy into it where the two encounter her for the first time in a gents toilet and in a later sequence say “Hum Tujhse Pyaar Karte Hai”.
Surprisingly though, its Irfan Khan who gets all the better lines here as the fiery cop and it’s interesting to see the depth he adds to a role that’s just another manifestation of the ever-stiff system-saviour. In a pre-interval sequence when he searches for Arjun Kapoor in the waters and tells, “Aao Aao, Upar Aao” followed by “Oh Durga Maata, Aaj Bachaliya Tumne Use”, you glimpse that he sinks all his teeth into this stereotypical act that could have very easily ripped the limited life of this drama. Calcutta’s presence, meanwhile isn’t greatly recognisable beyond the Navaratri festival. In addition, the Sohail Sen composed music tracks turn out to be too many in number for a standard formulaic mass-fare that tries to be pacy.
The cat and mouse chases, the warning-giving moments and ‘commit a crime without proof’ modes are rather a dampener even though you try hard to accept them for Ranveer Singh’s brilliance alone. Arjun Kapoor hasn’t come of age after Aurangzeb too as you see his desperation to show his villainous streaks and aggression at the same point, which he barely succeeds. While we arrive at the conflict, the focus on destroying the congeniality between the ‘soul-mates’ is obvious. In a scene where they fall prey to the trap set by the police, the two go on to talk about mutual calculations and favours they have done for each other which might have otherwise not even come into the picture.
The climax is equally jarring when the storyteller isn’t sure whether to end it on a rule-abiding note or the happy-ever-after pattern that our commercial films have stuck to from many years. Saurabh Shukla gives one of the better performances in this one where characters are mere eye-candy, especially when you talk about Priyanka Chopra. Gunday gets most of its inner embellishments right, but its tough to buy them when they collaborate to give a jaded output that partly entertains, amuses and irritates.
Review by Srivathsan N, who had originally written it for Cinegoer.
