Thursday, July 19, 2007

Freeze Frame #53, #54: Tumko Na Bhool Paayenge

Tumko Na Bhool Paayenge is an action movie in the glorious tradition of Bollywood potboilers - a fairly racy plot, a nearly invincible hero and lots of ketchup. Did I mention a perfectly logical plot? I didn't? Ah, well...

The plot borrows a few pages from The Bourne Identity and adds its own masala to it. You have an amnesiac hero trying to build a new life when the ghosts of his past intrude upon his idyllic existence, so he goes back to the world he came from, to find out who he was and what happened to him. Of course, as it turns out, our hero was a lean mean killing machine back then (bang bang), so he has enough old and new scores to settle (more bang bang). Job over, he returns to his new life, at peace with the world and with himself.

The first act, detailing the hero's peaceful life in a small village, with loving parents and a beautiful fiancee, is kinda slow and somewhat painful to sit through, but it passes muster on account of the little incidents that indicate that this man isn't who he seems, or who he thinks he is.

Things come to head when his engagement ceremony is disrupted by a bunch of goons who make references to his past, and then make the mistake of trying to kill his parents. He loses control and, in a short and breathtaking action sequence, kills all of them. As action sequences go, this one is among the most effective I have seen. In place of a quiet, shy, slightly confused guy, you suddenly see a cold-blooded killer on auto-pilot. This is how I imagined the first fight in The Bourne Identity would be.

The other sequence that I quite liked is similar to this one in terms of the action and the way it plays out, and comes later in the movie (but chronologically earlier, in a flashback sequence). There's a crucial scene where Salman kills the goon who killed his uncle - the whole scene is so strucured that you see not his face, but his girlfriend's (Sushmita Sen) reaction to her lover becoming a murderer in front of her eyes.

Sushmita Sen's performance is one of the best things about this movie, and her chemistry with Salman is a thing to behold. And what a voice! Deep, husky - more woman than girl in there, and that's a rarity in Bollywood.

2 comments:

Ratnakar Sadasyula said...

Freeze frame from this movie? Anyway this is a straight remake of The Long Kiss Goodnight, starring Geena Davis, itself a big dud.

Ramsu said...

Not quite The Long Kiss Goodnight either. No Samuel L Jackson character in the Hindi version.

Anyway, I quite enjoyed parts of the movie - it delivered what it promised, I thought.