★★½
“Death Wish, Bollywood style.”
For the first hour and forty minutes, you may well be wondering why this is here. You will need to be patient: it gets there… eventually. However, to start with, it’s the story of the battle between crime boss Nikka Shaitan (Grover) and dogged cop Inspector Sidhu (Kumar). After members of the former’s gang are caught attempting a bullion robbery, Sidhu seeks to leverage them to reach their boss. But Shaitan uses all the power – both legal and illegal – at his disposal, to avoid justice. Initially, a state of martial law (the title translates as “emergency”) gives the cops the edge, but after that is declared over, the balance shifts, culminating in Shaitan’s gang invading Sidhu’s wedding and gunning everybody down.
Shaitan again avoids justice, getting a corrupt politician to give him an alibi, leading to his acquittal. This is where we finally achieve GWG relevance, for the Inspector’s bride, Shikha (Sabah), vows to take revenge on every single person responsible for the death of her husband. She delivers, taking them out in a variety of ways, from shooting repeatedly in the head after removing their tongue, through burning alive, to hacking apart with a sword. It’s certainly enthusiastic, though the execution isn’t nearly as much fun as it should be. It demands a lot more blood. Naturally, Shikha uses the gang’s tactics to escape legal punishment, the film ending in a large caption asking the audience, “Do you agree with this?”
Well, since you ask… It’s a typical early nineties Indian pot-boiler, with all that implies. So, it’s overlong at 144 minutes, stuffed with terrible songs (and I like some Bollywood music – Singh is Kinng is one of only two soundtracks I actually listen to outside the film), and painfully simplistic, rarely approaching any level of delicacy. By most standards, this is not a “good” movie. But I did find it interesting. As depicted here, Indian cops do not give a damn about civil rights; how much of that’s due to the declared state of emergency is unclear (there was such a two-year period in India, but earlier, from 1975-77). On the other hand, the courts are depicted as incompetent and/or corrupt, basically useless at dispensing justice.
The sudden blossoming of Shika in the final act is also surprising. It’s rare for a film to end up with its hero or heroine being one who is barely even a supporting role during the first two-thirds. However, Rao manages to pull the switch off, albeit mainly through killing everyone else who you liked to that point. Shikha, assisted by her friend Razia, as well as another survivor of the massacre, then goes to work after the legal system has failed her, in a way which makes Charles Bronson look like subtle understatement. This is a clarion call to the vigilante inside the audience, about as subtle as a brick, and all the more fun for that. I’d edit this down to eighty minutes and call it a vast improvement.
Dir: V. Subba Rao
Star: Sabah, Gulshan Grover, Kiran Kumar, Aatish Devgan