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MOVIE REVIEW | 'KAANTE'
Shot in Los Angeles, but Bombay All the Way
By DAVE KEHR
delirious Bollywood reimagining of "Reservoir Dogs," complete with musical numbers, Sanjay Gupta's "Kaante" shifts as fluidly between cinematic idioms as it does between Hindi and English. Shot in Los Angeles with a largely American technical crew, Mr. Gupta's film, which opens today in the New York metropolitan area and Toronto, offers the fulsome sentimentality of Indian melodrama at one moment and the bloody, absurdly overscale violence of a Hollywood action film at the next.
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No points for originality will be awarded to Mr. Gupta's screenplay about six Indian hoodlums who band together to rob the downtown bank favored by the members of the Los Angeles Police Department. (The theory is that the bank will have light security, given the terrifying reputation of its depositors.)
The six men range in type from the natty, dignified Major (Amitabh Bachchan), a disgraced military veteran who participates in the robbery to raise the money to return his dying wife to India, to the screamingly psychotic yet oddly lovable Baali (Mahesh Manjrekar), a drug-addled killer with bleached blond hair and a bad stutter, whose motive is a retarded sister who needs looking after.
Strangely like their predecessors in "Reservoir Dogs," the six men spend much of their time sitting around restaurant tables engaged in intense discussions about nothing in particular. They also enjoy putting on sunglasses and dark suits and walking shoulder to shoulder toward the camera in rapturous slow motion.
Unlike "Reservoir Dogs," "Kaante" actually depicts the robbery, a messy affair in which the Dhogs, armed with automatic weapons hijacked from an evil Pakistani arms dealer, take on what appears to be the full, ferocious force of the L.A.P.D. But soon we return to familiar territory as the surviving gang members rendezvous at their warehouse hideout, there to settle the critical question of who among them is actually an undercover police officer.
Following Bollywood's tradition of excessive generosity, Mr. Gupta tosses in too much of just about everything, resulting in a two-and-a-half-hour film that may exhaust some viewers. There are a couple of extended, snazzily edited music videos, set in what is apparently Los Angeles' most fabulous Hindi strip joint, as well as an amazing sequence in which the men, chugging down Johnny Walker Black on the night before the robbery, sing out their dreams and aspirations. Scenes like this make you realize that Bollywood is essentially a nonnarrative art form, in which coherent storytelling plays a distinctly secondary role to the purple pleasures of the moment.
KAANTE
Directed by Sanjay Gupta; written (in English and Hindi, with English subtitles) by Anurag Kashyap; music by Viju Sha; produced by Mr. Gupta and Raju Sharad Patel; released by Media Partners. In Manhattan at the Loews State Theater, 1540 Broadway, at 45th Street Running time: 150 minutes. This film is not rated.
WITH: Amitabh Bachchan (Yashvardhan Rampal a k a Major), Sanjay Dutt (Jay Rehan a k a Ajju), Sunil Shetty (Marc Isaak a k a the Bouncer), Kumar Gaurav (Anand Mathur a k a Andy), Mahesh Manjrekar (Raj Yadav a k a Baali) and Lucky Ali (Maqbool Haider a k a Mak).
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I think I might wait and get the reports from others first. Also Saathiya and 'Die Another Day' are opening here along with Kaante, and I'd much rather go see those first.
