Bang Bang Hindi Movie
We are living in the day-and-age where brawn matters over brains. Exhibitionism rules the land. Movies that are brain-dead are applauded, whereas movies that even attempt to get those brain cells churning are derided. All that the movie-goers care about is being entertained, even if that means the actors have to run around flapping their arms like chickens or worse yet, singing impromptu rap songs with Yo Yo Honey Singh about partying and booze.
On the other hand, all that the filmmakers care about, apart from making more money than they can count in a week, is giving the audience a "Bang" for their buck. "Bang Bang!" tries to do one better and give you double the treat.
The film is an (official) remake of the Hollywood movie Knight and Day, a movie that wasn't quite the money-maker that people perceive it to be and not nearly as well liked as people make it out to be. At its best, the film cruised through on the likability of its leads Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz. At its worst, it was an insufferable ultra-high budget Bollywood movie. The only way that remaking it could've been acceptable was if Tom Cruise had promised to convert to Hinduism in return.
But who are we to question the insatiable urge of producers to make horrendous amounts of money, especially if the public is more than willing to accept whatever is thrown at them? You get what you ask for.
So the film opens in a high-security prison where Jimmy Shergill, in a guest appearance that is basically a declaration that he has no career left to speak of, indulges in the most ridiculous trash talk ever with the world-renowned terrorist Danny Denzongpa, who's trying to make a similar declaration. The scene ends in Shergill's death and also bleeding from your ears.
Then Denzongpa stays and chitchats at the prison with his acquaintance Jaaved Jaffrey, who sports neck tattoos and his wife's overcoat. Denzongpa wants Jaffrey to acquire (steal) the famed Kohinoor diamond from a British museum. After chitchatting for a few more minutes, they finally decide that a prison that you're trying to escape from isn't the best place to discuss buying jewelry for your girlfriend. So they leave.
This is where our hero enters the picture. As dozens of newscasters hamming away to glory tell us, the diamond has already been stolen. We're told the man behind the theft is Hrithik Roshan, instantly making him the target of both cops and the mob alike. In between jumping over rooftops trying to escape them, he manages to fake being the date of a woman he saw across the street (Katrina Kaif), dance the night away with her, open her eyes to a new world and then beat up some bad guys again. Basically, he ends up doing everything short of an exorcism. Sadly (for us), he ends up involving her into his mess, giving Katrina Kaif ample opportunity to try and flex her acting muscles to no success.
Remaking a film successfully takes more than just making the same film again. You have to tread the thin line of being faithful to the original material, all the while trying to offer the audience something that they hadn't seen in the original film. This is a scene-by-scene rating of the level of originality in "Bang Bang!": silly Bollywood masala, minor modification to tailor it to the "brainless" Indian audience, copied, copied, copied, minor modification to adjust to the Bollywood budget, copied, dialogues also copied, copied, minor modification for brand promotion, copied, minor modification for brand promotion, dialogues also copied, copied, minor modification to tailor it to the "brainless" Indian audience, copied.
For all his hunky physique and fitness, Hrithik Roshan is actually terrible at performing action that hasn't been performed by his stunt double or generated through special effects. So, he basically serves one purpose in this film. Every time he takes his shirt off, you can hear women clapping and screaming and see spit dribbling from their mouths and the producers can hear the "cha-ching" sound of money falling into their laps. Katrina Kaif tries so hard to act, you're actually afraid she might pull a facial muscle. After a while, she just gives up and starts taking her clothes off too. More "cha-ching", I suspect.
The direction by Siddharth Anand is more awkward than a person holding a guitar for the first time and being asked to perform in front of a live audience. It is also more clueless than a person trapped in the middle of an ocean on a boat without a map. The terrible music doesn't help the cause, and neither do the spectacularly mediocre action sequences that run longer than the Lord Of The Rings trilogy.
So, if your reason for watching a film is "to just be entertained for a couple of hours", then you'll probably get what you deserve here: a poor excuse of a film that has a brain without a cerebellum. But for the sake of the future of humanity, I would like to believe otherwise. In that case, you'd be better off staying far, far away from this snooze-fest.
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