Film: Gabbar is Back
Director: Krish
Cast: Akshay Kumar, Shruti Haasan, Suman Talwar, Jaideep Ahlawat, Sunil Grover
Director Krish gives Gabbar the power to reduce corrupt forces to pulp. Gabbar is a teacher, an aam aadmi called Aditya, who teaches gravity and then defies it by bouncing bribe seekers and their allies against the ground.
The film raises its voice against corruption but doesn’t hesitate to utilise a cult character and his timeless punch lines to further itself.
It couldn’t resist the stock item number either. As a result, the high moral ground that it takes seems rather unjustifiable. Like many other mass entertainers, it’s content with milking people’s discontent with society.
Making Gabbar the hero is a strong statement on the times we live in, but the kind of vigilantism that the film casually promotes is dangerous.
A remake of Tamil hit Ramanaa , Gabbar is Back has Akshay Kumar reprising Vijayakanth’s role from the original.
He literally towers over everybody in the film and his swagger is unmistakable even in a romantic number. While it may annoy the discerning, the Khiladi Kumar fans won’t be complaining.
But the director fails to keep the momentum going.
The villain, Suman Talwar, is too cold for a film that otherwise brims with colour.
Despite being given interesting punch lines, he proves no match for Akshay’s high-pitched performance.
The other disappointment is the romantic angle between Akshay and Shruti Haasan.
Though she has an endearing screen presence, the fact that she plays the character of a bubbly girl who has no idea what her boyfriend is up to makes her quite irrelevant.
The flashback with Kareena Kapoor is too glossy to create any emotional impact.
Despite all the reminders of subversion that he is Gabbar and not Gandhi, what one really misses is the moral dilemma of a teacher who involves his students in a mission that leaves corrupt people hanging from lamp posts with no judicial probe. Nobody questions him about making his personal revenge into a mass movement.
It is one thing to unleash a single man on a larger-than-life villain but quite another to have him take on something as grand and all-encompassing as corruption.
Recent events have shown us the implications of doing so.
Anuj Kumar
