Subhash K Jha revisits Mani Shankar’s spy drama 16 December, which released in 2002.
The imminent Hollywoodization of mainstream Hindi cinema continued full-throttle with debutant director Mani Shankar’s slick espionage flick 16 December, which masters all the tricks of the tantalizing trek from buildup to climax in one sleek swish of special effects, heightened drama and collaborative chemistry.
In trying to take on slick Hollywood thrillers like Mission Impossible and Charlie’s Angels, Mani mingles history with hearsay, fact with fiction, and escapist thrills with pseudo-documentation. The director doesn’t quite negotiate the distance that divides our cinema from Hollywood. But he makes a defiantly direct effort to make an uncompromised, historically rooted spy thriller, which is more in the league of the Nick Carter pulp novels than the films of Brian de Palma or Ridley Scott.
What really distinguishes Shankar’s film is its winking homage to Indian history. Though 16 December falls into the prevalent pattern of passionate patriotism by indulging in some high-voltage Paki-bashing (wisely, the censors have deleted all damning references to our neighbouring country), it doesn’t go back to the Partition of India to gather fuel for its friction.
Instead, Shankar’s often-taut screenplay returns to the 1971 Indo-Pak war when, after a humiliating defeat, Pakistan was forced to create a sub-divisional country, Bangladesh. From this moment in history, Shankar weaves a febrile thriller where a crazed former general of the Pakistani army declares a private war against India.
To stop him, we have a group of Indian army men led by a very convincingly alert and agile Danny Denzongpa. The rest of the ragged team, comprising the lithe triumvirate of Milind Soman, Sushant Singh, and debutante Dipannita Sharma, is also perfectly in sync with the trigger-point urgency of the narrative. Though some of their espionage adventures are a trifle too dramatic, the protagonists look like a team, which is half the battle won.
Most of the time, Mani Shankar displays an admirable economy of expression. He averts the humbug of hysterical hijinks that make a majority of mainstream movies resemble variety shows rather than comprehensive films. But then Shankar flounders in the second half by taking his romantic lead to New Zealand, where a strange and laughable triangular romance occurs between Milind Soman, Dipannita Sharma, and model-actress Aditi (playing an NRI banker with a chip on her neck rather than the shoulder). The two romantic duets on the foreign shores break rudely into Shankar’s otherwise chillingly integrated narrative, emasculating the film’s Hollywood-centric intentions.
But the climax, a stirring and stylishly designed concoction of rattling guns and battling goons set at a music festival in Delhi, makes amends for the enfeebled interlude in New Zealand. With the crazed Pakistani eliminator hellbent on destroying Delhi with a nuke on the same date when Pakistani forces surrendered in Dhaka, 16 December ably replicates the feverish excitement of James Bond thrillers.
More than James Bond, Mani Shankar’s film is a homage to the spirit of the Hardy Boys’ fiction for pre-adult boys. It adapts itself well to the computer generation by cleverly deploying a precocious little boy to decode the password on the nuclear weapon that could destroy Delhi. By doing so, the film establishes a disarming connection between the new-age spirit of learning and growing and the traditional way of looking at cinema as a tool of gripping entertainment.
It’s very difficult to slot 16 December in the present-day scenario of Indian cinema. Not a crime thriller or a whodunit and certainly not a melodramatic vehicle celebrating bombastic entertainment, 16 December makes earlier espionage thrillers in Hindi look amateurish in comparison. Ironically, director Mani Shankar cannot avoid amateurishness in handling some of the crucial action sequences.
The performers help quite a bit in evening out the odds. Danny Denzongpa grabs centre stage with a controlled and sinewy performance. Gulshan Grover, as the slippery Robert Ludlum-inspired antagonist, gets to do what he always liked best: change into various disguises. Both the men bring a sturdy maturity to their parts and impart conviction to Mani Shankar’s fast-paced thriller. However, some of the supporting performances by actors playing politicians and terrorists are embarrassingly juvenile.
Understandably, the film’s special effects aren’t comparable with what we see in present-day sci-fi spectacles. Considering the inherent limitations of filmmaking in this country, they serve the narrative’s purpose well. The same goes for the film on the whole, which covers a new territory with confident, sometimes cocky, strides.
