Guns and virile poses
Bollywood gangster flicks are a dime a dozen these days. Only a handful of them manage to stand out. Shootout at Wadala nearly does. But for all its stylistic vim and vigour, it falls prey to a propensity for excess.
The film delivers an overwhelming surfeit of everything – blood-soaked action sequences, glorified machismo, no-holds-barred cuss words, and raunchy item numbers.
As the cops and gangsters gun for each other with bullets and punch lines all through its two-and-a-half-hour runtime, Shootout at Wadala throws in as many as three item songs, including one by Sunny Leone, who, not surprisingly, leaves nothing to the imagination.
Overload is the name of the game for co-writer and director Sanjay Gupta, so he gives you two more of the same musical routine post-interval, with Priyanka Chopra (Babli badmaash) and Sophie Chaudhry (Aala re aala) doing the honours.
But all said and done, the making of Shootout at Wadala, which traces the rise and fall of mafia don Manya Surve, is marked by a degree of visual and technical panache that is difficult to miss.
Aided by his cinematographers (Sameer Arya and Sanjay F Gupta) and production designer (Sunil Nigvekar), the director recreates the 1970s and 1980s Mumbai ambience to great effect.
A large part of Surve’s story – that of a young man who was sucked into a life of crime when he was wrongfully jailed for a murder he did not commit – comes from a journalistic account of the period (Dongri to Dubai: Six Decades of the Mumbai Mafia) by S. Hussain Zaidi.
The heightened fictionalization of the life and times of the most dreaded of Mumbai’s crime lords gives Shootout at Wadala a dramatic edge that might have had a greater impact had the director opted for more restraint.
A few of the performances are outstanding. Anil Kapoor, playing ACP Afaaque Bhagran, Surve’s tormentor, is consistently effective, while Manoj Bajpayee wades into the character of Zubair Imtiaz Haskar (modelled on Dawood Ibrahim) with visible delight. Unfortunately, neither Kapoor nor Bajpayee is the fulcrum of the film.
That onerous role is apportioned to John Abraham. He has a wide range of emotions to convey as he interprets the larger-than-life figure of Manya Surve from his college days in the early 1970s all the way up to his death in a police encounter in 1982. It is too tall an order for the actor. While he puts in a game effort, he isn’t quite able to evoke the requisite air of menace.
Shootout in Wadala certainly isn’t in the league of Parinda or Satya, but it is no worse than the film that it is a follow-up to, Shootout at Lokhandwala. Notwithstanding its excessive reliance on violence and expletives, it is watchable for the most part.
Bollywood gangster flicks are a dime a dozen these days. Only a handful of them manage to stand out. Shootout at Wadala nearly does. But for all its stylistic vim and vigour, it falls prey to a propensity for excess.
The film delivers an overwhelming surfeit of everything – blood-soaked action sequences, glorified machismo, no-holds-barred cuss words, and raunchy item numbers.
As the cops and gangsters gun for each other with bullets and punch lines all through its two-and-a-half-hour runtime, Shootout at Wadala throws in as many as three item songs, including one by Sunny Leone, who, not surprisingly, leaves nothing to the imagination.
Overload is the name of the game for co-writer and director Sanjay Gupta, so he gives you two more of the same musical routine post-interval, with Priyanka Chopra (Babli badmaash) and Sophie Chaudhry (Aala re aala) doing the honours.
But all said and done, the making of Shootout at Wadala, which traces the rise and fall of mafia don Manya Surve, is marked by a degree of visual and technical panache that is difficult to miss.
Aided by his cinematographers (Sameer Arya and Sanjay F Gupta) and production designer (Sunil Nigvekar), the director recreates the 1970s and 1980s Mumbai ambience to great effect.
A large part of Surve’s story – that of a young man who was sucked into a life of crime when he was wrongfully jailed for a murder he did not commit – comes from a journalistic account of the period (Dongri to Dubai: Six Decades of the Mumbai Mafia) by S. Hussain Zaidi.
The heightened fictionalization of the life and times of the most dreaded of Mumbai’s crime lords gives Shootout at Wadala a dramatic edge that might have had a greater impact had the director opted for more restraint.
A few of the performances are outstanding. Anil Kapoor, playing ACP Afaaque Bhagran, Surve’s tormentor, is consistently effective, while Manoj Bajpayee wades into the character of Zubair Imtiaz Haskar (modelled on Dawood Ibrahim) with visible delight. Unfortunately, neither Kapoor nor Bajpayee is the fulcrum of the film.
That onerous role is apportioned to John Abraham. He has a wide range of emotions to convey as he interprets the larger-than-life figure of Manya Surve from his college days in the early 1970s all the way up to his death in a police encounter in 1982. It is too tall an order for the actor. While he puts in a game effort, he isn’t quite able to evoke the requisite air of menace.
Shootout in Wadala certainly isn’t in the league of Parinda or Satya, but it is no worse than the film that it is a follow-up to, Shootout at Lokhandwala. Notwithstanding its excessive reliance on violence and expletives, it is watchable for the most part.
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