Oh my god!. Review on The Hero

How does one spend 55 crores and make a movie with no entertainment value whatsoever? He signs up Anil Sharma as the director, Shaktimaan as the screenwriter and Sunny Deol as the hero for a Indianised James Bond movie.

Right from the word go, the movie makes no sense. An attempt to pass off Sunny as a cool, sophisticated, all-knowing, all-doing spy is nothing short of ridiculous, even by Bollywood standards. Anil Sharma and Shaktimaan seem to have tried to come with a sophisticated, ultra-chic Gadar. Scenes from Gadar, such as Sunny single handedly deafeating an entire Pakistan battalion (in a forest, again) are repeated. However, what they completely forgot was that even though both movies have Pakistan-bashing as their USP, Gadar managed to tug on some powerful emotions in the cinemahouse. And that was because it was the story of a common man rising up to fight for his right. The Pakistani bashing was a good add-on for the crowds. The scenes that brought the most applause for Gadar were scenes where you could see the resistance of a common man against fear and power. Whenever Sunny has succeeded (Arjun, Ghayal, Ghatak, Damini and Gadar), he has played the common down-on-his-luck man who rises up against the powerful forces of evil that have done injuystice to him (or someone else). Whenever he has tried to be the sophisticated hero (Indian, Champion and Maa Tujhe Salaam) he has fallen flat on his face. But some people never learn.

The movie begins with a line saying ''Our intention is not to slander any country or individual'' or some such thing. Five minutes into the movie, you know that they possibly couldn't have been serious about that line. The opening sequence of a spy movie should be something that blows you out of your seat, something completely mind boggling. What we get instead is a stupidly concocted sequence of a camera

hidden in...guess where...the chandelier of the ISI's conference room and some crap about Sunny ''intelligently'' outwitting the bad guys. It sets the tone (a very very bad one) and the rest of the movie follows that. Later on in the movie, Sunny goes to village, Sunny distributes sweets, Sunny makes speech with big talimaar dialogues, entire village becomes Sunny fan. Why restrict Sunny's abilities to one

village? Why not send him to every village in Kashmir? And well, just in the rare case that you're thinking otherwise, this is not the only lousy scene in the movie.

The movie is also full of high-tech nonsense meant to impress the masses. Radioactive material being kept in bottles which can be broken by hand, the ISI chief using the Internet to search for background material on someone he is suspicious of being a spy, ISI information being carried in floppy disks and memory chips-in-

lockets, code being cracked graphically with big red letters dancing around the screen and best of all, huge (and I mean huge) cameras being put right on the front of the dress without the Pakistanis noticing them. And what in the world is 12 midnight GST? GST is a 7% tax paid in Canada, not a standard time, and I assume a world class spy's right hand man would know that. The Pakistani intelligence probably does not know what it is doing. Preity Zinta comes straight from Kashmir and is directly inducted into the household of a Pakistani colonel. When top secret plans for India-destruction are being hatched in a house, they should atleast

be sure of who is in the house. Also, they have no troubling in believing Sunny (in one of his many disguises) when he tells them that he knows all about their top secret plans because he is also fighting for the independence of Kashmir. I must definitely be missing something here cause this statement somehow does not convince even a common man with average (or maybe below average) intelligence

like me and yet it manages to convince the chief of the Pakistani intelligence. If the Pakistani intelligence is so stupid then us Indians must be abolutely idiotic since we can't seem to stop what they're doing.

Some things can be accepted, like Sunny falling from a cliff and landing without a scratch. After all, it is a superspy movie and I am a big James Bond fan. But even when its acceptable, its not done with style and that makes it appear absolutely stupid. In addition to all the cliched anti-Pakistan dialogues, there are the stupid scenes to show our mahaan-ness like the scene where Sunny leads an Indian force

in killing Pakistani soldiers and yet strives to save a Pakistani flag from falling down. Please, please, give me a break, a big one! Even the songs are mediocre, none of them having the emotional power of something like Udja Kale Kawa from Gadar. The action is absurd, sappy and totally devoid of even a hint of style. And coming from

Alan Amin, it is a big big disappointment.

Its not that I was expecting much from the movie. But what I got was third degree torture in the cinema hall for three hours that seemed like three hundred.

What was the most ridiculous thing about my Hero experience? I actually took a Pakistani with me to watch the movie who obviously cursed me during and after it was over. Why did I not leave during the break (or better still, five minutes into the movie)? Because I am the stupid optimist who keeps hoping the movie will start making some sense later on. Why did I go to watch it in the first place? Because I have a fissure in my head from where my brain is leaking out slowly.

I could go on ranting about how bad the movie is, but I believe you get the point.

Final word: Do not watch this movie unless you have nothing to do and are being paid atleast ten times the ticket price.