Subhash K Jha looks back at Sunny Deol’s Indian which released in 2001. Directed by Maharajan, the hit action drama also featured Shilpa Shetty, Rahul Dev, Mukesh Rishi, and Raj Babbar.
Sunny Deol’s larger-than-life image as the one-man anti-corruption bureau gets an ostentatiously refurbished stab at the boxoffice in debutant director Maharajan’s strife-torn saga of terrorism in high places.After Gadar Sunny once again slips into his tailormade role, rendering the part of the idealistic patriotic cop Raj Shekhar Azad with a ferocious fervour that gives him a deified image. The crusader –cop’s role is nothing new to Hindi cinema. From Prakash Mehra’s Zanjeer onwards filmmakers in Mumbai have discovered novel methods of using the Khaki colour to draw bloody visuals of men in uni(que)form.
Though Maharajan draws on his inner resources to implant rabblerousing rhetorics and furious action into the kahani of a committed cop’s crusade against corruption, somewhere the film misses the chance to draw crucial answers to vital questions on militancy and hooliganism , to concentrate on giving Deol a run for his (production) money.
Sunny Deol’s fans are certainly not disappointed. India’s no.1 action hero doesn’t speak , he roars. And so does the audience every time he belts out a patriotic line. In the confrontation scenes within the state-of-the-art Hollywood-inspired prison with the terrorist Wasim Khan(Mukesh Rishi) Deol dons the patriotic mantle with a raging intensity.
At one point, he even takes off his shirt to appear barebacked and mustachioed on screen as the nationalist leader Chandrashekhar Azad to remind the audience that India’s freedom is again endangered.
The stabs at historicity are bogus, meant to provide titillating interludes in a plot that functions on thrills rather than intelligence. The hi-powered narration tries to stay a step ahead of the audience, and quite often succeeds in doing so.
Maharajan is not very good at drawing relationships among the characters. The interaction between the cop hero and his wife Anjali ( Shilpa Shetty) is so perfunctory, we wonder why Ms Shetty has been ‘waisted’ in her hip-swinging role. The songs and music where the hero suddenly abandons his missionary zeal to get into quasi-missionary postures in the love songs, are also awkwardly designed to convey a psychedelic dimension within the patriotic convention.
And when the two feline veejays Malaika Arora and Sophiya Haque are joined at the hip and lip for a dance-in-the-den , the film abandons its patriotic pretensions altogether.
What first-time director Maharajan enjoys doing is the violent confrontations . Deol and the ever-powerful Danny Denzongpa(who plays a godman and closet terrorist, a la Chandraswami) get together to whip up a frenzy of fanatical antagonism aimed at inciting patriotic passion in the audience. But at the end of the reasonably well staged drama we feel we’ve seen and heard it all before in scores of films that purport to convert the serious problem of state terrorism into a fullblown formula.
The film is rescued from the raga of redundancy by some interestingly shot dramatic moments such as the one where the protagonist whips out his gun and shoots his senior(Raj Babbar) when he realizes the other man is an anti-national. The dangerously fascist instant-judgement-and-punishment theory is rationalized by our hero when he screams at his colleagues in the police force, “I’m not just a cop. I’m also an Indian. If my mother is being raped will I seek my father’s permission before rescuing her? My country is my mother.”
Murder India, anyone? The exceptionally high-blown rhetorics work only to a point. After a while the anti-militancy message is lost in the pyramid of pulpy thrills and hi-tech action that culminates in a bus mowing over a battery of cars that come in its way.
The film is aimed at the lowbrow viewer. But even he would find it difficult to digest a sequence such as the one in which Deol batters and mauls two boorish politicians from UP and Bihar one after the other, right inside the privacy of his office in the police headquarters.
Besides Sunny Deol’s carefully orchestrated machismo, the film has two appealing cameo performances by Rahul Dev, who changes his sociopath’s image to play an earnest patriotic, and Om Puri who as a jokey CBI officer investigating the death of the murdered police commissioner lets our ‘Indian’ hero off the hook by reasoning, “You’re the Krishna and the Arjun in this Mahabharat where there’re the Kauravs and only one Pandav.”
Here, Puri didn’t mean to be funny. But the mythological allusion as applied to the impassioned vigilante-hero is the cruellest joke of all.
