Bachchhan Paandey
Director: Farhad Samji
Year: 2022
Duration: 147 minutes
Music: Various
Rating: 6.0
When you watch a foreign film with subs, chances
are you are missing a lot. Nuances, bad translations, double meanings, slang,
whatever. We know that going in, but I was still surprised to see the Letterbox
reviews on this film from Indians. They hated it like scurvy. All of them
that I saw. The film bombed at the box office, so they may have a point.
But I thought it was fine. Nothing I would recommend with enthusiasm, but
it has good production values, a couple fun musical numbers, a strange and
silly plot and one big star. Why did they hate it so much? What did I miss?
Part if it seems to be that it is a shadow of the Tamil film Jigarthanda
that was released in 2014 and that this is a remake of. Not a problem for
me as I never saw that film. Yes, the story is idiotic, the tone swerves
around like bumper cars and Akshay Kumar puts his character into absurd overdrive,
but none of that bothered me really. It's Bollywood.
Myra (Kriti Sanon) wants to be a director,
but she gets bounced off a set as an asst director for being too good in
the opinion of the director. She realizes she has to come up with her own
script and is advised that gangster stories based on real characters sell.
She ends up targeting Bachcchan Paandey (BP), a gangster up north with a
fearsome reputation. He is a complete psychopath with a glass eye and loves
killing people just because he can. The police can't touch him. He burnt
a reporter alive for a cartoon of him. Everybody tells Myra not to do it.
So of course she travels to his town and begins to secretly film and follow
him.
None of this is very smart but then she
bugs one of his men and overhears a murder. Time to get out of town. She
doesn't make it. But before he kills her, she squeaks out, I just wanted
to make a film about you. Magic words. A film about me? Make people terrified
of me. He decides that only he can play BP. It is all good natured though
a strange mix of dark humor and hard hitting violence. He really is crazy
and Akshay plays him with a manic intensity. It goes soft eventually of course,
but I thought it had some good moments.
