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Sad. Shah Rukh couldn't do it. Salman Khan was just so-so. Sunny Deol flipped. Govinda tripped and David Dhawan nosedived to unfathomable depths. Naturally, all hopes were pinned on a hitherto unsinkable ship: Aamir Khan's Ghulam. The beleagured Bombay film industry fervently believed the Raja Hindustani would add his Rangeela touch to the currently colourless box office. |
They were wrong. Ghulam has just one colourful sequence : the Chalti hai kya khandala song which captures Aamir at his perky best. But that you can watch on your telly, so what's the point of going nau se barah for one more plotless venture of the year. Aamir is actually the saving grace of this single-sequence film. As Sidhu, the downtown tapori, he displays a genteel charm which shines through his jagged exterior. Behind the rings, the lockets and the leather jackets there lurks a gentleman who offers 'cheeng gum' to his distressed damsel, invites her to Khandala when she is maltreated by her alcoholic dad and lends her his soft shoulders to cry upon. More importantly, he tries to kowtow some kind of an ethical code - live and let live - in the concrete jungle of urban crime. Haunted by memories of an adarshewadi (principled) father who filled his childhood with heroic tales of the freedom struggle, Sidhu hopes to follow the good, clean life someday. So what if Dada, his elder brother, has turned his back to his father's legacy and wafted into the world of crime as the local goonda's fix-it man. Sidhu chooses to work out his aggressions and frustrations in the boxing ring instead and the prototypal dare-devilry of the tapori lifestyle. The movement of Sidhu from this position of moral ambiguity to a stickler for truth forms the core of the film. Unfortunately, the story does not grow, only the character does. And the credit for this rests solely on the small shoulders of Aamir - the actor with the widest range of histrionics amongst the current crop. The abysmal lack of an original storyline is desperately made up for by an unabashed plagiarism of sequences from Deewar, Mashaal, Ghayal and even Marlon Brando's On The Waterfront and The Wild One. When these wources dry up, Vikram Bhatt looks for another escape route. He converts the entire second half into an extended fight between the bad guy (Sharat Saxena) and the good hero. Two prolonged boxing bouts are all that the post-interval session can boast of. Ironically, even these lack punch. Primarily because the bad guy has smallish contours and hardly deserves the prolonged attention. In fact, apart from Aamir, all the other characters are mere silhouettes. Rani Mukherjee who was being heralded as the new star on the celluloid horizon has nothing to do. A few screams, some songs and then it's sayonara. Really sad. |
