FILM: Fast & Furious 7
DIRECTOR: James Wan
CAST: Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Dwayne Johnson, Jason Statham, Kurt Russell, Michelle Rodriguez
The best part of the seventh edition of the Fast & Furious franchise is its last 10 minutes.
Apart from the action, the film encapsulates the mood and sentiments of a team and pays a glowing tribute to Paul Walker, who was killed in a car accident, albeit unrelated to the film, in November 2013.
But to reach to this final 10 minutes of the film, one has to endure a barrage of outlandish ear-deafening action sequences, sprinkled with a few comical as well as emotional moments that take place across continents.Nevertheless, Furious 7 is a high octane, over-the-top, adventure caper, that is frivolous in nature.
It definitely caters to its fans’ expectations.
The story takes off from where it left in the previous edition and from the very onset stresses on “family ties and friends”.
The narration begins with Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) and the team. Haunted about their past, they are now trying to settle down to a sober lifestyle.
But Deckard Shaw (Statham), who had lost his brother, is hell bent on avenging his brother’s death.
After numerous attempts to curb Shaw, Dominic and his team approach FBI Agent Luke Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson).
He is unfortunately holed up in a hospital with a bandaged arm and his daughter to monitor him.
Hobbs advises Dominic to seek the help of a secret CIA operative (Kurt Russell), who introduces himself as “Mr. Nobody”.
The CIA agent agrees to oblige them, only if Dominic’s team would secure a sharp tracking device for the US government.
On the other hand, a group of mercenaries led by Jakande (Djimon Honsou), are also attempting to lay their hands on the tracking device.
Director James Wan, who had earlier given us a few horror movies like the Saw and The Conjuring series, has very resolutely delivered this action-packed film, keeping in tune with its pedigree.
Unfortunately, what makes the narration tedious, is the talk-heavy exposition and continuous loud action scenes, from start to finish.
They numb your senses forcing you to even snatch forty winks.
But when you are wide awake, you can relish some preposterous action sequences shot at post-card locales along with unusual stunts which include fisticuffs and street-style fighting. Some of these are nail-bitingly edgy.
The dialogues are crisp and tempered with the characteristic one-liners that have been often seen in the series.
These are especially evident, during moments of one-upmanship, when the cast keeps ribbing their opponents, “too slow”.
These serve as a reminder of what the film is about.
On the performance front, there is nothing exceptional to talk about.
Emoting has never been a strong point of these action heroes.
They deliver strong lines stoically and the ladies too are no better.
Visually too, alternating between shots of foot on the accelerator and the speedometer, the adrenaline rush of the speed thrills, is effectively created by the sound design and quick edits.
The songs with the lyrics, “Oh oh my, I couldn’t believe in my eyea” and the one at the very end, “We have come a long way about you, my friends” as background score is touching.
Overall, this film will only appeal to fans of the series. (IANS)
FILM: Detective Byomkesh
DIRECTOR: Subhash K Jha
Cast: Sushant Singh Rajput, Anand Tiwari, Swastika Mukherjee, Divya Menon, Neeraj Kabi; Director: Dibakar Banerjee
As layer after layer of intrigue and mystery are peeled off this Chinese puzzle of a movie, you are finally left staring wide-eyed and open-mouthed at a work of wondrous art.
Exquisite in form, compelling and at times, deeply impenetrable in content, Detective Byomkesh Bakshy (DBB) is what a whodunit was meant to be all along.
Somehow Hindi cinema never got down to doing a real murder mystery before this.
Maybe the genre waited to be cracked by the deftly disingenuous Dibakar Bannerjee.
To get to the bottom of that mystery of why the murder mystery never came to fruition before this, we must wait for the film on the desceration of the whodunit in Bollywood.But for now.
Here it is. Ladies and gentleman, unveiling the smartest smoothest and slickest and the most slippery whodunit in Hindi cinema’s living memory.
“DBB” is a stubbornly placid tale of an iconic detective who seems to know more about Kolkata and its underworld than any authority of or on the metropolis in the 1940s.
The film’s writers, and I do mean Urmi Juvekar and Dibakar Bannerjee, and not Sharadindu Badhopadhyay who penned the original detective novels, lend a gripping flow to the narrative by bending the plot into shapes which are not recognizable or definable by the rules of the genre.
At least, not the way we’ve so far perceived the murder mystery in Bollywood so far.
Smells, sights and specially sounds emerge from the storytelling with a casual flair for making the obvious look subtle and the innocuous, dangerous.
Wickedly misleading and yet resolutely clear-headed even as the detective-hero (Sushant) and his reluctant assistant Ajit Banerjee (Anand) gambol from one suspect to another to piece together a mystery that has no reference point and certainly no history, this is a film that requires us to abandon all attempts to be one-up on the narrative.
We have no choice but to go with the writer’s whimsical flow.
From the seeming ebbing and swelling of the narrative tide, Dibakar seems to derive a huge amount of unprecedented narrative power.
The film moves across a luscious labyrinth of sensuous experiences.
Kolkata’s grime and sweat is captured in crumbling guest houses and rickety warehouses where crime is a desirable reality only because the other option is ennui.
The narrative creates a feverish aura of frisson and power-play in the way the characters appear to respond to the socio-political and economic reality of Kolkata in the 1940s.
It would be an insult to the film to say the period is created with unhampered pitch-perfection.
Because not for even one shot do we feel the hand of the art director in shaping the Kolkata of the era gone-by.
Dibakar’s old Calcutta of trams and self-important bustle emerges not from cinematic pulls and pressures but from its own volition to create a world where the characters do not seem to pose in the clothes and mannerisms of the time. They just seem to be there from long before the Dibakar Banerjee school of filmmaking came into being.Providentially Sushant seems to intuitively comprehend what the director and his brilliantly articulate cinematographer Nikos Andritsakis have set out to do. Sushant doesn’t simply get into the detective’s skin.
He inhabits every nook and corner of the character.With due respects to the vivid portrayal of Byomkesh by Rajit Kapoor in the Doordarshan serial of the 1980s, Sushant is now officially the face of Byomkesh.
He owns the part as much as Kinglsey owns Gandhi.Particularly riveting are Sushant’s scenes with the extraordinarily brilliant Neeraj Kabi.
When they are together on screen we are looking at neither actor as they both take us to a distance far away from their spoken words.
Swastika’s movie-star impersonation is filled with coquettish grace.
The performance comes dangerously close to a caricature but is miraculously taken into the zone of nostalgic seduction.
And yes, Anand as Byomkesh’s sidekick looks flustered and tired enough to convince us that the only thing the young in the country can do to avoid catastrophe is watch films while the country burns.
A scintillating synthesis of the cerebral and the sensual, DBB is an enigmatic whodunit cooked on the slow burner at a tantalizing temperature.
Dibakar Banerjee’s Kolkata pulsates with a heart, soul, body and nerves of steel.
This is a world whose existence the makers of Furious 7 could never imagine.It’s a difficult world to inhabit. But once you are in, you are in it for good. (IANS)