cLueLess RemAKe mAKes oRIgINAL seem much betteR

H Immatwala

sTarriNg: Ajay Devgan, Tamannaah

DirEc TED by: Sajid Khan

SHridevi said recently that her 1983 career-making potboiler Himmatwala was no Mughal-eAzam. She was right to a point....Until now, when Sajid Khan’s remake of the film has come along.

And suddenly the old Himmatwala appears to be a classic!

It gave us the timeless Sridevi as an arrogant spoilt rich bitch who mouthed insane dialogues like “I hate the poor”. Thirty years later, Tamannaah Bhatia does a Sridevi. She gets into Sridevi’s leather pants, with a whip to match, and tortures the peasants in a village lorded over by a fatuous feudal dad who is not really evil. He is just mad.

We hear the larger-than-life hero Ravi (Ajay) mouth words of oldfashioned heroism with a straight face. But somehow we aren’t convinced. Indeed, there was more than a dash of Shakespeare’s Taming Of The Shrew in the way the original Himmatwala Jeetendra brought Sridevi to heel.

The new-age Sridevi is a squeal. She quickly changes from her audacious mini skirts and high heels, to salwar-kameez, solely for the man in her life.

We can look at Ajay Devgn in Himmatwala as the man who came in from the cold and warmed up the bucolic baddies’ backsides with what he calls a “bum pe laat”. Cute? That’s how Ajay plays his shehar ka hero gaon ka super-hero part. He wants us to believe he is having fun with the trite part. But the boredom underneath the facade of fun shows up often enough to make us cringe.

The fractured world of Sajid Khan’s Himmatwala is not looking for healing. It is happy being unfinished, wonky and out of shape. A wheezing grunting snoring world of demented feudalism where the Zamindar, as played by the gifted Mahesh Manjrekar is part-fiend, part-clown.

Mahesh and Paresh Rawal do the Amjad Khan-Kader Khan banter from the original Himmatwala with a dash of homo-erotic humour when they are forced to share a bed in a cowshed.

Is this a film to be taken seriously? And when a tiger appears from nowhere to help the hero fight the goons in the climax, how do we set aside the uneasy feeling that the narrative is laughing not with us, but at us?

S UBHASH K. J HA