Contraband – Predictable Fun While It Lasts

Director: Baltasar Kormákur

Actors:  Mark Wahlberg, Giovanni Ribisi, Kate Beckinsale

Rating: 3/5

There are films made on predictable scripts. Yet their execution often raises their quality a few notches and though overall there’s nothing really to love or hate as the film hangs in a balance in no man’s land, you do give a thumbs up to the director for the brave rescue act. ‘Contraband’ is one such film.

An ex-smuggler who has gone legit, is forced to return to his old ways after his brother-in-law gets into trouble. He faces insurmountable odds to smuggle a huge cache of counterfeit money while also trying to protect his family.

This film is like the famous computer game ‘Dave’; where the protagonist encounters seemingly impossible obstacles one after the other to emerge victorious. Thus, the crux of the story is not revelation of secrets, though it has its predictable share, but in the impossibility of the obstacle before him and the resources that he brings together to get over it.

And though our hero is a smuggler, in typical films of the genre, he is given enough moral authority in the minds of the viewers – he is protecting his family, he is being set up, he is a good guy at heart – for us not to mind his prosperity stemming for an illegitimate act.

And the stakes put up against him are so high that your heart goes out to him and his family. You root for him as you know he has no option but to push through the inferno and not around it because inside it is smelting the purest gold that will solve all his problems of the past, present and future. And it is in making you pray for his success that the film succeeds, and not because of any cinematic merit.

It is a formula film where the hero ends up richer than he started out and the villains are punished. Yet, like life, it is about the journey. Such a film cannot be self conscious. It has to be natural enough and the direction, invisible.

Yet, that does not take away the accusation that almost everything in this remake of an Icelandic film Reykjavík-Rotterdam in which Contraband director Baltasar Kormákur is the lead, is taken from somewhere else; from heist, gangsta or action thrillers. Yet, it is not taken to such a level to seem overbearing.

E.g. in the end the discovery of a rare painting worth more than the money made in the heist, is typical of a Guy Ritchie movie where two ancient guns or a big diamond makes it worthwhile for our protagonist (copied copiously worldwide). Yet, in the film it seems more like a closing of a loop of a previous heist, though any discerning viewer would have obviously figured it out much before.

Kate Beckinsale is almost wasted in a small role while actor and producer of the film Mark Whalberg plays a kind of role he has become comfortable in over the years. A good, but not a ‘must’ watch.

This review has been written for the newswire service Indo-Asian News Service. 

The Descendants – Gentle, Sensitive Masterpiece

Director: Alexander Payne

Actors: George Clooney, Shailene Woodley, Amara Miller

Rating: 4/5

What do we inherit from family and friends, lovers and parents? Money and property or emotions, shared memories and melancholia. What value do any of these have in the kind of world we live in? Do those values change with the infusion of some unknown information or understanding?

‘The Descendants’ dares to ask these questions in a seemingly fun, lighthearted sort of way that belies its depth and sincerity of emotions.

Matt’s (George Clooney) world turns upside down when his wife lies in a coma after an accident. A lawyer by profession, he is a descendant of the royal family of Hawaii and has to take care of his two daughters, something he has never done. As if getting the information that his wife would not recover was not enough, he finds out that she was having an affair.

One of the brilliance of the film lies in its fluctuating sub-genres. Though broadly you could call it a comedy-drama, it is also a farce, a satire and a romantic film among others. Yet, it does not get carried away in any and stays firmly on ground to give a delectable experience.

The Descendants is deceptively simple and lighthearted. 

Thus the most important character in the film is that of the wife in coma, Elizabeth. Besides the first minute of the film when we see her surfing, in the rest of the film she is comatose. Yet, for good writers and directors, there’s nothing like a woman in coma to shake things up vigorously.

A comatose Elisabeth thus becomes a metaphor for all the emotions, memories and feeling that we have repressed or regressed inside, hoping or waiting for it to go away till something shakes us and have them bubble out like a shaken aerated soft drink. If you could nominate a lifeless actor in the film for the various meanings her lifelessness carry, this one would get an Oscar.

The Descendants is as deceptive a film as the state of Hawaii which to an outsider seems nothing but a sun and sand paradise. The film shows the real side of the island to give you a cinematic equivalent of sipping a rich, matured wine that fills up your mouth with invigorating warmth.

Clooney is good, but it is perhaps the maturity of his well written character that has got him an Oscar nomination. The others, especially Shailene Woodley as his angst ridden, mother-hating teenage daughter who becomes her father’s confidante, excel. The impeccable casting complements this wonderful trip through Hawaiian landscape, music and its various seasons.

Add to this the writing and direction that manages to be effortlessly funny and you’ll know why you have a gem amidst you. Alexander Payne is no stranger to films with humour which like a gentle breeze in a hot summer soothes not just your body, but also your soul. This is first full length feature film after his 2004 masterpiece ‘Sideways’, and he does it once again with a film based on a novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings.

People talk about the first shot of films being important. ‘The Descendants’ shows you how it could be the last. It has no jimmy jib shot following your protagonists into the sunset. It merely has a long shot of three people watching TV together on a couch. This last scene, if you have understood the film, will seem like the last few strokes of a genius painter, or the last underline or two dots under an important signature. 

'Haywire' - Tale of a Modern Femme Fatale

Director: Steven Soderbergh
Cast: Gina Carano, Ewan McGregor, Michael Fassbender 
Rating: ***1/2


Hollywood is always on the lookout for deadly femme fatales who can give men a run for their action and testosterone. Prolific director Steven Soderbergh's third 2011 release 'Haywire' manages this with a film whose story is average, but which he compensates with his neat, slick direction bound to appeal to both men and women.


After a successful European mission, Mallory (Gina Carano) - an ex-marine who does black-ops for a private company, is surprised by her next assignment: of being arm-candy for a British spy. Her suspicion is proven correct as she finds police chasing her for a murder she has not committed. Can a lone woman fight off an entire army of men out to get her?


In Mallroy, director Steven Soderbergh creates a woman on the lines of Jason Bourne, but unlike our amnesic spy, she has no identity crisis. Like most women, she knows exactly who she is and she will break your neck if you try to prove otherwise. For she is dangerous and armed, heck she's more dangerous unarmed. She is a damsel who can rescue a man in distress.


Don't tail her for she knows how to tail you back. She's not unreasonable but if you get unreasonable with her, even He - your masculine god - cannot save you.


'Haywire' is in the mould of modern action thrillers, where unlike films of the past, it is more about throwing good grapples in hand to hand combats than it is about shooting. Even your once 'shaken but not stirred' James Bond now gets his hands dirty in parkour chases and fist fights. So how can the femme fatale of the 21st century be any different?

In Gina Carano Hollywood might have found an femme fatale answer to Jason Bourne.

You thus have Mallroy punch, kick, lock hands and legs of an opponent, crawl under a car, jump over fences and through rooftops...basically doing everything you would never expect a girl like her to do. And therein it breaks stereotypes of women in cinema, never mind that the story and the final obvious mystery is not half as good as the action and direction.


Soderbergh, who has always been a lover of women as evident from his previous films, makes careful efforts to show the superiority of his woman, both moral and physical, in different ways. For instance, Mallroy is never unreasonable and it is always the men who throw the first punch, or coffee, trying to catch her unawares. Her fight then is one of mere self-defence in which she recovers from the initial shock to shock the daylights of her men.


Also Mallroy is not a big talker, like the silent 'male' heroes in the action films of the 1970s. She listens and observes, and when required, kicks or shoots her way out of a jam. She's a doer not a mere talker.
In mixed-martial arts champion Gina Carano, Hollywood might finally have found their first hand-to-hand combatant that will draw in the crowds. All you ladies out there, go hoot for this first female modern martial artist in cinema. For every James Bond or Jason Bourne, you now have a Hanna or Mallory.

Underworld: Awakening – Slick Rebooting Of The Franchisee

Directors: Måns Mårlind, Björn Stein

Actors: Kate Beckinsale, Michael Ealy, India Eisley

Rating: 3/5

The ‘Underworld’ franchisee has never been about great cinema. This unselfconscious series has been about a credible story backed by good special effect riding on the fighting skills of a latex wearing femme fatale.

Though seemingly this isn’t such a hard deal to maintain, the series had indeed been lurching on the edge, ready for a nosedive. “Underworld: Awakening” skews the balance in its favour, delivering a good action packed special effects ride that does not seem like a waste of money on stupid special effects.

The discovery of vampires and Lykans in their midst lead humans to hunt them down. Serene (Kate Beckinsale) and her Lycan-hybrid lover try to escape but are separated by a human attack. Serene wakes up 12 years later to find a changed world where the vampires and Lycans are almost extinct. Or so everyone thinks, till she discovers two secrets: one about their species and the other about herself.

Vengeance Returns? Nah, latex returns. 

There is nothing original in either the story or its progression. Yet, directors Måns Mårlind and Björn Stein know their craft enough to ensure that the film does not go over the top or be self-consciously pretentious. In evenly playing out the story, they give the film a credibility and emotion that seem to have been missing in the last installment.

As it had been from the start, this too is Kate Beckinsale’s film. Cinematic sister of the latex-wearing Carrie Anne Moss in Matrix, Kate looks as young as she did in the first part nine years ago and as ferociously vulnerable.

This part does a few interesting departures for the fans of the series. Humans, who had so far been excluded from the fight, feature in this. In that sense, the film brings the war between vampires and werewolves into the foreground from the underground with humans playing both enemies and allies to them.

The writers were also obviously referring to their series while naming the film ‘awakening’. From going into the history of the past in the last two films, it finally comes back to the present, thus rebooting the franchisee with some interesting friends and foes thrown into the picture. There will obviously a fifth part in 2015. After all we have had one Underworld film every three years.

For action and gore junkies, there’s enough of both to salivate them. A decent Hollywood action film is expected to have typically conceptualized shots that make the audience hold their breath and which often involves the protagonist making creative use of their guns. This one has a spectacular one with a lift and other well choreographed scenes.

Throw into that a little bit of motherly emotion for good measure, and the film manages to be just the ride dope for the lovers of irreverent, unselfconscious and often pointless action films. 

This review has been written for the newswire service, Indo-Asian News Service (IANS).

Good Night Good Morning – Good, But Has Nothing To Say

Director: Sudhish Kamath

Actors: Seema Rahmani, Manu Narayan, Raja Sen

Rating: 3/5

Every time a film critic dares to make a film and puts money where his words have always been, it’s laudatory. For it is the equivalent of your cricket-expert, corporate buddy - ever-ready with pointers for Sachin - actually facing a Brett Lee bouncer.

Because critic or not, like cricket, we all have views about cinema. But very few ever dare to test them. Few who have, like a Truffaut or a Godard or even Peter Bogdanovich, have changed cinema.

And though ‘Good Night, Good Morning’ is no ‘400 Blows’ or ‘Breathless’ or even ‘The Last Picture Show’ it manages to hold your urban attention to ponder over relationships, even if for a brief moment.

Two complete strangers, who had bumped into each other at a bar, engage in a night-long banter. From nothing, the conversation veers towards relationships and in one night the two go through the whole life cycle of a relationship from the first hesitant date to romance, break-up, patch-up etc.

There are two sides to the film, the good and the bad. Let’s begin with the good. If you suspend your disbelief as is required of you in the darkness of a theatre, it its believable. The two lead actors do manage to portray a good range of emotions required of them. The writing and direction is decent and doesn’t indulge in unsavory gimmicks.

Sadly, it tries to do a Woody Allen and Richard Linklater but fails miserably. It has neither the tragi-comic timing of Allen’s cinema nor the depth of Linklater’s ‘Before Sunrise’ from which it takes inspiration.

And though the conversation is witty, managing a few chuckles, it is too literal to offer anything. This would have been fine if it hadn’t taken itself too seriously. Sadly, it does.

Next, you wonder as to why on Billy Wilder’s and K Balachander’s name (to whom the filmmaker pays respect) is it set in New York when it could easily have been set in say Mumbai, with the boy driving down to Pune.

The only reason that comes to mind, looking at the zillion odd references to everything American - is that the writer knows more about American culture than he does of his own. Or perhaps it is shame.

It thus becomes another desi-dream on the big screen, a low-budget equivalent of a Bollywood film set in Hollywoodland to seem ‘global’. Thus in its cinematic politics of becoming a ‘feel-good’ indie it is no different from a ‘Kuch Kuch Hota Hai’ which it spoofs brilliantly.

It thus misses out on the biggest strengths of indie cinema – the local flavour. Not just for indies, but any cinema with serious aspirations, local is always global. The film thus seems like the work of an ABCD – American Born Confused Desi, only in this case the ‘American’ is replaced by ‘Indian’.

The film thus become an example of a ‘globalized’ world. Today, most Indians born in its urban towns, raised on a staple diet of American entertainment, are more American than many American themselves.

Having said that one cannot take away the command Sudhish has over both writing and direction. Sadly, presence of form or style can never make up for the lack of content. One only hopes that this brave critic, in his next film, takes up something more real. 

This review has been written for the wire service Indo-Asian News Service (IANS).

The Inheritance Of Injustice

“Everyday, 2 dalits are raped and 3 killed,” goes a shocking statistic in celebrated filmmaker Anand Patwardhan’s latest documentary, ‘Jai Bhim, Comrade’. It begins on one such murderous day, 11^th July 1997 when 10 dalits gathered to protest the desecration of an Ambedkar statue, were shot dead by Mumbai Police.

Six days after this massacre, unable to take the pain and grief of his people and as a mark of protest, dalit singer, poet and activist Vilas Ghogre committed suicide.

‘Jai Bhim…’ then traces the legacy of the unique democratic protest style of the Dalits, through their stirring poetry and music and the story of Vilas Ghogre and other singers and poets.

What emerges, are tales of injustice and atrocities in the world’s largest democracy that will wrench your gut. Its riveting parallels span not just Maharashtra (where the film is situated) but the world.

The 11^th July incident, you realize, resembles the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919 where the British fired upon an unarmed, peaceful assembly without warning.

A dalit leader in the film is heard saying, “We have a singer, a poet in every home.” It is here that you realize the similarity between the fight for justice of the mostly lowly and oppressed of Indian people, with that of Afro-Americans. Both share a strong tradition of music and poetry that provides them relief, strength and prepares them to fight against injustice.

This is the reason why the state of Maharashtra blacklisted one of the strongest Dalit music groups (prominently featured in the film), the Kabir Kala Manch (KKM) by calling them Maoists. Truth, after all, can unsettle an unjust order which the powerful need maintained. 

Anand Patwardhan has a keen sense of social satire. He rips apart the notion that equal justice prevails for everyone in India. When you see political leaders of national stature speaking of wiping out entire castes and religions, which in a true democracy would have landed them in jail, you realize how truth can sneak out from rhetoric and rewriting of histories, and punch you in the gut.

Documentaries thus serve as a public justice system. The powerful may not be punished for their murders, but those who see the film can see their true face, and remember.

‘Jai Bhim…’ also abounds in irony of how a constitution drafted by a ‘dalit’, Dr. B R Ambedkar, continues to fail his own community. It balances the grand sweep of Dalit injustice with individual stories. Thus on one side you see a dalit working in a garbage heap without the basic protection, cleaning Mumbai’s filth, you also see middle-class Mumbai talk about ‘how dirty and filthy these people are.’

The films objectivity is laid bare because it spares no one, from the Left parties who claim to speak for the oppressed but refuse to see the similarity between their ‘class’ and ‘caste’ and even the dalit movement itself which, led by opportunist leaders, has been sold to the same politicians who caused the 11^th July 1997 massacre in the first place. Anand Patwardhan says, “What really attracted me as I went on my 14 year voyage of discovery was that the underclass in India has a long, unbroken tradition of reason right from Charavaka and the Buddha to Mahatma Phule and Dr. Ambedkar. Despite the oppression by the elite this core belief system has survived through the ages.”

Through the film, Anand makes the 11^th July incident a fitting metaphor for what has been happening in the country with the Dalits for thousands of years. It is also symbolic of how the state, often ruthlessly and often cunningly, rips apart and decimates movements for justice and equality in India.

In a fitting screening which Anand calls its ‘real’ premiere (previously screened in a few film festivals), over eight hundred people in BIT chawl in Byculla, where a part of the film was shot, sat mesmerized on the 9^th of Jan, without a break for its 200 minute duration, the chill of the cold Mumbai wind managing not even half the chill of the film.

In an ideal world cries against dalit-injustice would have sprung all over. Since we don’t live on a just planet, “Jai Bhim, Comrade” will retain relevance till caste based atrocities are not uprooted. For it may have taken Anand Patwardhan14 years, in reality this story of those who inherit injustice in their genes, has been in the making for thousands of years in India. 

A shorter version of this feature was written for the wire service IANS and appears in thousands of publications online and print publications across India and  abroad.