AAN ---> GONE??? STUPID Bhankas. Review on Aan - Men At Work

Happened to see this multi-starred movie because I couldn't get tickets of Harry Potter that I wanted see over the weekend.

I thought handling of police & mobsters in Indian movies had reached some level of maturity after Satya, Company, Ab Tak Chhappan & the likes (Kalachakra was a good effort sometime back). I was proved wrong by AAN.

The movie starts with thoughts/statements/excerpts by some greats & what they have to say about the Police Department. Some good collection of thoughts then follows with typical 80s style of entries by the Heroes/cops like Sunil Shetty, Shatru & Akshay. Before their entry, the movie spends 10-15 minutes on a song & on Jackie shroff's lifestyle.

I got real worried that the rest of the cast won't get much time to introduce their their characters/traits etc. I mean the editor should have been a little worried that 15-20 minutes are spent just to explain how Jackie works & his night club meetings....song etc???

Sunil Shetty does some slow motion(slowmo) action stunts that are disconnected...i.e. stretched so much that they don't make any sense & also there is no impact of them. Basically an encounter specialist who goes disguised with the Police shoes polished enough to catch an eye of the gangsters.

Akshay Kumar enters in the movie with blanket/undercover cop & what follows is a ULTRA-STUPID to the max fighting sequence. It lasts for almost 10 minutes of valuable time where 8 machine-gunned men with helmets form a circle with Akshay as the center, 3 feet away from him...all of them firing at him like crazy....Akshay takes two revolvers in hand & starts some maneuver (Dandiya style) & somehow not a single bullet touches him.....He brakes the eye-glass of their helmets & then somehow all of them fall down! :)))) WHAT THE Fxxx ?????????? Then he starts a 5-10 minutes of fight scene with their leader, horse, karate slowmo slowmo slowmo etc etc etc....Eventually he ahs exposesed the racket of counterfeit currency & hence gets transferred to Mumbai! :) as the ACP & boss of Sunil, Shatru, Paresh R etc

Then the movie gets a little on track. i.e. mobsters etc. Irfan Khan has given a very good performance but again his character is not that well written. He has done a very good job in whatever script he got. There are a few scenes that are well written but they fell to make any impact due to weak overall plot. Attempts at humor are also with teh assistant of the home minister & the ''supplier''.

Paresh Rawal also brings some better moments but again there are quite a few low level jokes deliberately put to get a laughter. He along with Irfan rise above the movie & the clear winners of this movie. Shatru: Is as usual, makes some heavy dialogs. But somehow he has accepted a role as a jr officer to Akshay & also allowed some insulting dialogs being filmed towards him. i.e. not played with the story to make his position better. The question is why he accepted such a mediocre role/movie after such a big gap?

Akshay/Sunil are typical, Sunil Shetty is quite balanced & comes off as OK. Akshay looks ok & acts ok. No surprises there. Sunil Shetty's habit of leaving the scene with a kannad(?) dialog is not used very well, it should have included some English words to express his feelings to non-kannad people. (English words with just a gist of the dialogs)

Jackie Shroff, Raveena Tandon, Lara Dutta are all average. Songs in the movie are pathetic. Item numbers are so so. Om Puri is totally wasted & anyone could have done this role without affecting the impact...so weak that role is written.

Overall a very disappointing movie. A Big NO NO to anyone who plans to watch it. It is really not worth it to watch it in the theatre.

Regards,

~Milind