One 2 Ka 4
   
                  
Director: Shashilal Nair
Year:  2001
Duration: 175 minutes
Music: A.R. Rahman
Rating: 4.0
This film is a perfect example of what was going wrong with Bollywood at the turn of the century. It is bloated the way I feel after Thanksgiving dinner - three hours of which an hour could easily have been shaved off without anyone complaining. A lot of Bollywood films at the time were pushing it over three hours with scads of indifferent songs stretching it out. This one just misses three hours and by the end my patience was hitting the wall. And it is Shahrukh Khan who I think is great. He is a hammy actor but one with buckets of charm and energy. But though he is the hero of the film, he was very unlikable.  A total ass. He slaps his female co-star a few times and nothing he did after that could redeem him in my eyes. What the hell Shahrukh. And his female co-star is Juhi Chawla, seemingly one of the nicest actresses in Bollywood and one that Shahrukh had co-starred with in a number of popular films. The whole film left a bad taste in my mouth.



Bollywood films always bounce around a lot from genre to genre but this was more mood to mood like a bipolar girlfriend I was with years ago. One moment giddy, the next a psycho killer. It was exhausting to keep up with. Same with this film. I kept checking to see how much time was left which is never a good sign. One moment the couple is having a merry dance number and the next he is screaming at her or the children and pulling his gun out a few times. He needs help. So does she for sticking around. Then there are three John Woo like shootouts that are exaggerated like crazy but good fun. He plays a cop and apparently a cop in India can get away with pretty much everything - beating up suspects, shooting people as the first option, dropping people from a balcony and stealing from a drug dealer. But none of this is characterized as his being a bad and corrupt cop - this made him a good cop.



The summary I read made this sound like a good cop film. He and his senior officer (Jackie Shroff) are after a drug dealer and they are not polite about doing it. But the legal system keeps letting him go. There is also a rat in the force feeding the drug dealer inside information about raids. Shroff is taking care of four small children after his wife died and it would be impossible to come up with four more annoying children even if Hitler and Eva had Nazi children. Juhi sells pirated cds and is a buddy of Shroff's and has eyes for Shahrukh, but there is more to her than we think. Then in a raid, Shroff is murdered by a cop - though we don't see who - and the film turns into The Sound of Music as Shahrukh has to take care of the children. Just dreadful. If I was on a lifeboat, I would have jumped out. The music by A.R. Rahman is fine but the picturizations were fairly dull