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RVG ki Aag Super Flop |
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Sunday, 02 September 2007 |
Ram Gopal varma ki aag
Cast: Amitabh Bachchan, Ajay Devgan, Sushmita Sen, Prashant Raj, Nisha Kothari and others
Director: Ram Gopal Varma
Rating: *
 Ram Gopal Varma Ki Aag must be some kind of private joke between the director and Amitabh Bachchan. Could they have tried to get the public in on it, because, sorry, we didn’t catch it.
Varma who started out as a maverick, risk taker is eroding his reputation with every film. As for Bachchan, he can add this one to the list his worst films, so far led by Boom.
Even if a film as accomplished as Sholay had not been made, the original Seven Samurai plot is still a classic, and it has worked almost every time it has been made. Varma must have had to work doubly hard to do it so badly.
Sholay was not exactly original, but writers Salim-Javed had created some fabulous characters and wrote lines that became part of colloquial speech. Their masterwork was undoubtedly Gabbar Singh — evil, sadistic, witty — all the more powerful because he was played by a new actor. Amjad Khan was an unknown entity, everything he did was fresh. Amitabh Bachchan playing the updated Babban comes with too much baggage of past superstardom (he was one of the heroes of Sholay), and turns the character into a hopeless cartoon — with odd ticks and twitches, a silly "phoo" gesture and a disgusting licking of the lips when in the presence of a women. The only word that comes to mind is eeks! And the next thought: what’s wrong with him? Why did he agree to do this?
Mohanlal plays the updated version of Thakur — Inspector Narsimha (Mohanlal); Ajay Devgan plays Heero and Prashant Raj is Raj the two small time crooks hired to help fight Babban Singh, who in the urban version is a land shark, eying the land of Kaliganj — a coastal town somewhere near Mumbai. No other details are provided, but Varma creates a dark, Gothic world of dingy dens, under-construction buildings and derelict factories. Babban’s henchmen shot in close-up are a bunch of ugly, unwashed thugs. A lot of the action is shot with a swaying hand-held camera (Amit Roy) in tight, under-lit frames. It is as if Varma deliberately wanted to contrast the bucolic openness of the Sholay village with an urban claustrophobia.
In Sholay, the characters belonged to their milieu, in Aag’s semi-urban setting, a girl (Nisha Kothari) works as a rickshaw driver, dressed like hooker; a South Indian Narsimha’s widowed sister-in-law (Sushmita Sen) dresses like a Rajasthani in a black veil.
The people of Kaliganj are hardly ever part of the proceedings; and while massacres take place so close to Mumbai, nobody reacts. The police do nothing about a convict who escapes after killing so many cops and cuts off Narsimha’s fingers.
Varma is never able to draw the audience into the world of his creation. What he picks from Sholay he wrecks (the ‘suicide’ scene, what he adds on his own is messy; here is no humour, the characters are drab, the songs dreary and the picturisations indifferent —the Mehbooba number with dozens of half-clad dancers and a busty Urmila Matondkar is a bore. Except for Mohanlal and Ajay Devgan, there’s not one noteworthy performance.
If Varma really admired Sholay as much as he says he does, he would have left it alone. Or at least paid it a tribute that did the original proud.
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