Subhash K Jha takes a look back at Madhur Bhandarkar’s Aan: Men At Work and we hear from Shatrughan Sinha about the joy of making the film.
Actually, there are many men at work–both on and off screen—in Aan: Men At Work. While the cop-heroes sweat it out in their humid halos, the men behind the scenes also make their presence felt in rapidfire motions in this emotionless pictureshow . No sobbing Matajis(thank God!) but loads of slithering and sliding Mata Haris.
There’s of course director Madhur Bhandarkar, in his first foray into frenzied action. Big guns with bigger nozzles attached to them—of both the human and the mechanical mind—strut around with such exaggerated machismo , it becomes hard to tell the bad and good guys apart. Bhandarkar treats his heroes and villains (all festooned to the plot with formulistic splendour) like characters in an extended videogame for juvenile grownups.
That’s where another one of those ‘Men At Work’ shows up. Action director Abbas Ali Moghul holds the ricocheting reins of a major part of the narrative. Bang bang, crunch crunch, kill kill maim maim!!!….Other films have kissie-kissie item songs, this has hordes of kill-me-kill-me ‘item stunts’.
Akshay Kumar’s introductory sequence(running , nay scampering, into a good 10-15 minutes running-time) is like an autonomous sub-plot in the main event. The main event, needless to say, is a‘maim’ event. The fights between the band of khaki -clad super-cops(Akshay, Paresh Rawal, Shatrughan Sinha, et al) and the gang of Khadi and Tuxedo-clad villains(Mohan Joshi,Milind Gunaji, Irrfan Khan –yes he played a villain in this film–Rahul Dev, etc etc) are so elaborate, you begin to wonder which came first: the police force,its brutality or films about the brutality of the police force.
Don’t believe me. Believe your ears. Close your eyes and listen to the over-saturated sounds of this tangy tale of fly-by-night heroics. The onomatopoeic soundtrack is overpowered by gun shots and wailing sirens….some of the latter, in curvaceous human form crooning ‘Nasha nasha’ invitingly in crowded bars.
The dance items(there’re so many of them you finally stop counting) are like the frenzied copulation of virtual realists in an orgy of drugged ecstasy . Foamy bottles open with lathery suggestiveness as women of every colour complexion and,errr, size slither and slurp into the camera in intimate postures.
Really, if this is how underworld dons and their minions live who wants to be an honest cop with nothing more to your advantage than your pennyless morality?! Foreplay is the key to producer Feroz Nadiadwala’s filmmaking. He’s clearly the third vital Man At Work in this tale of bristling busybodies.He swamps the screen with sleek guns and sexy gals.
Akshay Kumar is at the helm of the glam-fest masquerading as a film about the ‘real’ life of dedicated cops. Some of the shootouts, for example Rahul Dev’s‘encounter’ killing by cop Akshay Kumar(done in stark brutal black-and-white) are admittedly high-octane stuff, designed to get the audiences collective adrenaline rocking and rolling.
Apart from the stunt director, credit must go to cinematographer Madhu Rao who brings in a semblance of sensibility , otherwise lacking in the narrative. Unlike, say Khakee the individual itemized sequences fail to hold together in a cohesive whole.
The drama is more dripping than gripping, with subtexts unabashedly borrowed from earlier cops films slapped on in a demonstration of eclectic machismo. At one point the dialogue writer even makes a humorous reference to Ab Tak Chappan . Humour is welcome in a film that often takes itself dead seriously.
The corpses easily outnumber the cops. And the casualties include the two characters played by Vijay Raaz and Rajpal Yadav who hold a whole conversation comparing women with alcohol.
Try that in today post MeToo scenario and see what you get! The ladies are as eminently disposable as liquor bottles. Besides the item bombs who cavort in a wall-to-wall carpet slide, the main female leads Raveena Tandon and Lara Dutta get abysmal footage. Lara Dutta’s song breaks with Akshay Kumar are no more than extensions of his macho aspirations. Raveena as the villainous tycoon Jackie Shroff’s mistress echoes Manisha Koirala’s character in Parto Ghosh’s Yugpurush. Raveena, poor thing, struggles to lend colour to a grossly under-sketched character. The film belongs to the men, with Akshay Kumar leading the piquant pack . He’s restrained sombre and effective. Paresh Rawal ‘s jokey –cop act is an alibi for his early death in the plot. Since the film is alreadyguilty of so many excesses, Rawal’s ‘joke’ on dirty graffiti about a distressed chawlwalla could have been avoided. Among the heroic brigade it is Shatrughan Sinha who makes the maximum impact.
Among the villainous performers Irrfan Khan makes the best impact. His selfconsciously crowd-pleasing sequence with a corrupt judge in the latter’s chamber smacks of an arrogant disregard for the government machinery that anti-establishment films are always guilty of.
Aan is one of those high-octane low-protein actioners that make a frontal impact without leaving any lasting impression. It wouldn’t be wrong to say what an American critic said about Mehboob Khan’s film of the same title. It just goes Aan and Aan…..
Shatrughan recalls Aan with pleasure. “My only film with the talented Mr Madhur Bhandarkar. If I am not mistaken my role was written for Shri Amitabh Bachchan. For reasons best known to him, he couldn’t do the part. I was reluctant to take on the role. But Madhur convinced me. Once I was on…or Aan….it was a whole lot of fun. The action scenes were excellent and the whole cast worked as a team. This was the only film where I co-starred with the much -missed super talented Irrfan Khan. So yes, memorable. I am not sure how well it did commercially. But it very different from what the director normally makes.”
