Review: ‘D-Day’ is too Bollywood for its own good

Don’t be fooled by other reviews of this movie. Nikhil Advani’s film on Dawood Ibrahim isn’t daring enough, and in fact scares itself onto the typical Bollywood route. Read our review to know what this RAW-takes-on-the-underworld-don flick is all about

Bollywood movies have a bad habit of trying to cater to everyone. This tendency mostly ruins films from being enjoyable watching experiences, and it’s absurd that directors don’t understand that. Nikhil Advani, perhaps to please the producers of D-Day, has made the movie fit for sale by way of inserting songs, and even attempts to sell the film to you by making it excessively sentimental. The music, however not-bad it may be, breaks the flow of the story, and weepy songs are the last thing you want when a group of RAW agents is trying to capture India’s most wanted fugitive.

D-Day has its tense moments in the second half, but it isn’t gritty at all. Operation Goldman, an attempt to nab Dawood Ibrahim and bring him back to India alive, goes awry. The plot of the film is broader, though: it’s also about the price the people related to these RAW agents pay, and the movie gets overemotional every now and then. The viewer is used to this tactic and is tired of every other Hindi film using it. Nobody is shedding tears, because we came to see Dawood.

Of all the actors who have played the underworld don, only two have done justice (funny, haan?) to Dawood Ibrahim. Vijay Maurya did it first and did it perfectly in Anurag Kashyap’s Black Friday, keeping intact and even magnifying Dawood’s image as this powerful, intriguing kingpin – the bhai of all bhais. In Ramgopal Varma’s Company, Ajay Devgan gave an intense performance as Malik, a character based on Dawood. Rishi Kapoor here, otherwise a fine actor capable of pulling off almost any role, has fun at the movie’s expense. He’s dead serious in the beginning, but as the film rolls on, he starts to enjoy himself, and you realize that the character he’s playing isn’t menacing at any point. Rishi Kapoor’s Dawood Ibrahim (Iqbal Seth in D-Day, because of the fraidy-cat filmmaker) delivers a hard-hitting yet funny monologue at the end, but that’s just one punch, and raise a chuckle is all it does.

Irrfan does his job right as usual, Huma Qureshi is beautiful, and Arjun Rampal gets to chill and mouth a few cool lines and have sex with a Pakistani hooker. In the end credits, Shruti Haasan is acknowledged not as ‘The Prostitute’ but as ‘The Girl’, and that’s pretty cool. No harm in showing respect.

But most of what you get from D-Day isn’t required; all you wanted was a tough, uncompromising film about Dawood Ibrahim, but we already got that in Black Friday and Company – even though those movies were about much more than Dawood Ibrahim. Maybe someday, when directors stop feeling the need to make their films salable.

RATING: 2/5

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Movie Review: Chaalis Chaurasi (2012)

Director: Hriday Shetty

Actors: Naseeruddin Shah, Kay Kay Menon, Atul Kulkarni, Ravi Kishan

Amidst card-playing, drinking rum-and-cola, conversations about buying a better television set and the end of the world, a police van decides to stop a car that has zipped past in the wrong lane. In the dead of the night, the policemen question the owners of the vehicle, and reprimand them for not consuming alcohol at the party they were returning from. The cops then go to a dance bar, eat and drink for free and also sing a song to entertain the other patrons. Soon after that, they are followed and stopped by a cop on a motorcycle, and it turns out that these gentlemen aren’t real cops.

Hriday Shetty’s Chaalis Chaurasi is a crime-thriller and comedy that knows when to be funny and when to get serious, a genuine rarity in the Hindi film industry. The four fake cops are actually an English professor, a car thief, a drug dealer and a pimp. Circumstances lead these guys to come to know of a fake-currency racket which could make them very rich, and ready for the good life, they hatch a plan which goes awry and falls back on them.

With the racketeers looking forward to decorate policemen with bullets and real cops on a mission to shoot dead a gangster, matters get really screwed for the four dudes. How the story shapes up is for you to watch at a movie hall near you, because it has four seriously good actors in a loaded-with-repartee film which allows them to act. That, and director Hriday Shetty can teach other filmmakers a few things about balancing comedy and drama and his commercial-shit-dropping brother a thing or two about wrecking cars.

RATING: 3/5

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