Movie Review: Jai GangaaJal, Bore Bore Dekho? No way!
Here's the latest update from the world of Bollywood. We bet you wouldn't want to miss this. Read on for details... Same old politics, same old cinema
Chalo Jha-pur. If you’re a glutton for punishment, that is.
It’s the same ‘ole dole. Here’s a venal land bristling with beastly bozos who’re out to grab power, glower, devour. Ministers are sinister, the poor are terrorised by boors. Red tape leads to rapes, blood-letting scrapes, and ceaseless deathly deeds are perpetrated behind handloom curtains, drapes and plenty more. Snore.
Obsessively writer-director-and-now-gasp-lead actor, Prakash Jha re-re-tells the same ole stale tale with Jai GangaaJal. Okay, so you know that life can be awfully oppressive in the rural hinterlands, it’s no fun time baajas baarats and brass bands out there. Snag is that Jha doesn’t offer any new spin or insight. It’s an ongoing hard day’s fight. Tell us what we don’t know already, sir.
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Style-wise, too, repetition can kill, evidenced here by the director’s habit of organising transitions between scenes by showing cars, Jeeps, SUVs entering the frame. Pssst, count ‘em: at least 25 scenes begin or end with automobiles. This device is as out of vogue in this millennium’s cinema as shifting manual gears. Utterly 'tyre'some.
Truly, about the only bold new step undertaken by Jha is to showcase himself in the film’s lengthiest role of one Babu Circle, a salt-and-peppery cop who’s eerily evil. Wait, oh, wait. Turns turtle, he suddenly to become as cute as a new-born lamb. In fact, if I timed his footage correctly, he gifts himself more footage and heroic derring-do than the poster lady Priyanka Chopra. Whatever possessed the director to attempt a very belated sensational debut, in vain, escapes me.
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Anyway, Jha’s brave bid at histrionics merely affirms the notion that a majority of directors are better off behind the camera. Like it or not, however much you suspend your sense of belief, Jha’s impersonation of Cop Babu Circle is about as convincing as a Rs. 300 currency note. So there he is, hanging out jejunely with the satanic Babloo Pandey (Manav Kaul, in the danger of being typecast after his poisonous pellet act in Wazir).
By the way, who in heaven or hell is Babloo? No free snack coupons for guessing that the hullabaloo-addicted Babloo is to contest elections which are just around the corner. They always are. Worse, his bumptious brother, called W for brevity, has been grabbing farmlands to set up a thermal power plant. Ergo, murders are being passed off as farmer suicides. Bad, sad state of affairs indeed.
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Enter Fearless Nadia reborn (Chopra), who’s been instructed to clean up the scenario. Eowwwww. That she does by wielding a fixed no-nonsense expression, a lethal lathi and by kicking butt as if she’d watched too many Bruce Lee-Jackie Chan flicks while training at the police academy. Naturally, the body count multiplies faster than any electronic calculator.
Next: miraculously our Salt-and-Pepper Babu Circle turns over a new leaf. Make that a new tree, actually. Bitten by his conscience, the reformed cop must save a schoolboy from Babloo and Co. Difficult?
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Not especially. Towards the film’s latter half, there’s little conflict, lesser tension. None of the bad guys, including an effeminate henchman, is a match for the combined forces of Fearless Nadia and Salt-and-Pepper. Not to worry: this is no spoiler alert. There are miles to go before you sprint out of this cliché-crammed, half-baked political thriller, which taxes your patience infinitely.
Clearly, Jai GangaaJal is no patch on Jha’s earlier GangaaJal which specifically touched upon the Bhagalpur blindings and Apaharan which dealt with abduction crimes in Bihar. The political content, if any here, is muted and vague. Moreover, even if a US-returned activist is shown protesting against the thermal plant, he vanishes like the genie from Aladdin’s lamp, without so much as a by-your-leave.
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At times, the dialogue strives to be crowd-friendly with quotes like, “Kichad stains can’t be cleaned with dirty water.” Or it tries to be provocative, tarring all America-sponsored NGOs as organisations with a covert agenda. No elaboration offered. On the chauvinistic front, Lady Nadia is told, “Give a woman a khaki unform, a danda and she goes out of control.” Really now.
Predictably, Chopra’s the only incentive to even dream of teetering into Jai GangaaJal. She’s watchable for sure, but so impeccably groomed and cosmeticised that only a strand of hair is ruffled even after a marathon slug-out. If you ask me, the make-up department should have discarded the mirror, brush and eyebrow tweezers.
Never mind, she’s still the only lively element in a dead-loss of an enterprise. Worth a miss.
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