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(I suspect that there will be spoilers ahead; so, if you're concerned about that sort of thing, you might want to stop reading:)
Priyadarshan seems to be one of those directors who can pull turd after turd out of their assholes, and still somehow not become the objects of critics' and audiences' venomous ridicule. Yes, Priyan somehow weaved together a hillarious, intelligent, sincere film called Hera Pheri in the year 2000. Since then, however, he hasn't pulled even a single magical delight out of that directorial top-hat of his. Hungama fell apart at the end, but was overall all right, and that's as close as the man came to success after Hera Pheri. Again, though, through some freaking pact with Satan, Priyan goes on being regarded as a competent, intelligent film-maker. If nothing else, I think Bhagam Bhag should be the final straw in breaking this one-hit-wonder's relentless, undeserved credibility.
I'll start with the good, since there's just so much bad, and I want to start out with the easy stuff. Akshay Kumar — after sucking goose-crap in the boring, unfunny, painfully-stupid Garam Masala — is back to his comedic best. He's not the "Raja" that he was in David Dhawan's incalculably under-appreciated Mr. & Mrs. Khiladi. Instead, Kumar gets to play here the one guy in the film who is both believably funny, and, well, has a brain in his skull. It's in part the way his character is written, but also largely the way Akshay plays it that makes "Bunty" the only sympathetic character in Bhagam Bhag. When everyone else is still pulling very 1990s "running around and screaming like a fucking Bellevue-runaway" bullshit, Akshay Kumar's character is concerned that they keep the buffoonery to an utter minimum. His lines as the lover, as the homocide-suspect, as the entertainer — his delivery of them: Kumar just steals the show.
It's nice to see Govinda back on the big screen, but it would be foolish to call this his "comeback vehicle." He's got a better part in Bhagam Bhag than Amitabh Bachchan had in 1997's Mrityudaata (the latter's supposed "comeback film"), but he's got next to no screen-time. Yes, Priyan grants him a few classic fast-talking Govinda lines, but, other than those few-and-far-apart moments, the man has nothing to do but occasionally hang around Akshay Kumar. Paresh Rawal, too, is predictably watchable, but, toward the end, his "Champak" just forgets the person he's been till that point in the film, and becomes a bumbling, fumbling, foolish "Baburao" (Hera Pheri) clone (hell, he even gets the eyeglasses for a second or two). Rajpal Yadav, though not yet what Johnny Lever was for the late 1990s, is getting there. Of course, that's a terrible fucking thing. Unlike Lever, Rajpal Yadav has talent; like him, however, he's grossly over-exposed, and resorting to the same gimmicky tricks in every comedy cameo he gets. I think, in Bhagam Bhag, he still works; but, just barely so. Jackie Shroff is finally not sickening to watch again, and Lara Dutta is just adaquate in her small (stupid-as-shit) role. Neither has much to do, though, and, thus, neither really affects how good or bad the film is.
Unfortunately, most of the remainder of the "secondary cast" is composed of raving idiots. Sharat Saxena is a decent actor, and he tries to work with what he has, but, let's face it: what he has is the dumbest, most annoying part in the movie. "Yes, boss" gets irritating by the fifth time it's uttered; by the twelfth, I almost want to tear into the screen. Sadly, all this happen within the first two or three minutes that his character is on screen. (More sadly, he's got a decent bit of total screen time, but only the one line to fill it.) I hate Arbaaz Khan, and he doesn't do anything to make me not hate him, here. He's not around for too long, but every time he shows his face, I want to throw my show at his head. I abhor Manoj Joshi about as much as I do Arbaaz Khan, and he's at least as despicable an actor. Though he has more room in which to work than does Sharat Saxena, he manages to flaunt his pitiable skills by making you hate his presence even more than the latter's. Shakti Kapoor's character is not just neglectable; it's intrusive. His "Guru" pops up at all the wrong times, and actually doesn't do a thing to facilitate the plot. His mere existence is an ode to how insane Priyan has gone.
I guess I started in on the bad in that last bit, but, here's the last of the good: "Signal" is a hell of a way to start off the movie. The ending-credits song works as well. Till about fifteen minutes before the interval, the movie holds together as a good-enough comedy, and Akshay gets the pleasure of pulling it a few notches above being merely "adaquate." ...That's it.
The bad: Just about eveything that happens from about a quarter of an hour before the intermission, until right after the words "Filmed by Priyadarshan" shamelessly come splattered onto the screen. Bhagam Bhag is a movie that has no idea what the hell it wants to be. It starts out a comedy, but soon thereafter becomes something that tries to be much darker. Seeing someone stand in a room, lit afire — plainly, painfully, obviously — is not something that belongs in a light-hearted comedy. I don't object to violence of gore or anything, but I don't see how it's meant to work in a comedy, either. Death can occur in a comedy: Weekend At Bernie's is just stupidly good fun. If people are to be killed (even supposedly) left and right, that's fine... so long as it's done against a comical back-drop. Bhagam Bhag, however, seems to go all out in trying to elicit moods of altogether different genres of films at several moments. One minute, it's a comedy; the next, a thriller; the next, an "on-the-run" film; the next, an "on-the-run" comedy. The tempo of the film is about as consistent and compelling as the background music to which it is set. The climax is not only dumb and half-assed per se (for the love of god, cease trying to explain the excess of horse-manure that you've spread over the past two hours of your film by having some mysterious character "explain it all" in the sum of about five minutes... ALL OF YOU FILM-MAKERS: STOP IT!), it's totally at odds with the tone of the other goings-on of the plot. How can anyone accept an emotional climax when a barrage of retards is scaling the steps of a clock-tower to reach the scene? Which brings me to my final gripe:
I don't know just why he does it: I don't know if he thinks it's honestly funny, if he's under pressure to make an ass of himself by the mob, if he's fearful that "breaking tradition" will result in his untimely and gruesome death. I don't know what it is about him, but Priyadarshan seems to harbor this unassailable fucking proclivity to include, at the ends of all his pictures, about ten minutes of every fucking character in the script running around and behaving, almost literally, as though he or she were a retard who was wrongly placed in an insane asylum, and has now escaped and decided to wreak havoc on the tolerance of the audience. Following the shitty suit of all his other movies that I can recall having seen, Priyan's Bhagam Bhag ends on a note of sheer bull-shit idiocy. The film's about to end, and it hasn't happened yet, so every cast member of the project is paraded on-screen simultaneously to hand from a ladder or something like a god-damned moron till every last one has suffered some sort of comical injury. ...Yeah. It barely worked in Hera Pheri, and hasn't worked once since, but Priyan seems just convinced that this little trick of his is pure gold, and so refuses to let it go. Well, it's not gold; it's a 24-kt. brick of shiny yellow shit, and it needs to stop.
A good movie is more than just a couple of very-enjoyable moments. It's a total, coherent effort, which Bhagam Bhag just is not. Maybe it's high time that Priyadarshan stopped being praised as some sort of creative genius, and instead became recognized as a guy who, one time, got lucky (or, maybe, managed to do a good job on his own). I haven't seen his regional films, and it's entirely possible that his work there is utterly marvelous. Maybe Priyan's just not good at making good Hindi films. Maybe he doesn't care enough to really try in the "Bumbai industry." Maybe it's this, or maybe it's that. No matter what, though, what it certainly is not, is an acceptable reason to praise a man who's done nothing of value, nothing meritorious, in more than five years. Bhagam Bhag is stupid, sloppily-thrown-together garbage, and it's about time for Priyadarshan to shape up, or ship the hell out of the movie-making business.
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