Wednesday, June 4, 2008
SHAURYA - A Movie Review
The wise guys in Hollywood take great pride in calling the Indian film industry Bollywood (a moniker derived from Bombay's Hollywood). When one watches films like Shaurya, one has no choice but to accept this indignity.
On the surface, Shaurya is a decent film. It has a sensible premise, and a grandiose intent. Samar Khan fails in his half baked rip-off of a brilliant Aaron Sorkin script however, and that is what stings.
Starring Rahul Bose and Javed Jaffery with Minnisha Lamba and Kay Kay Menon in supporting roles, Shaurya tells the story of honour and courage, and honouring courage. Rahul Bose is the wayward military lawyer who would rather be sky-diving and having "sex with the sky" in some corner of the world than practicing law, and Jaffery is the conscientious recently engaged best friend, on his own trip advancing his career. Bose and Jaffery share a unique bond apparently, and one cannot be without the other, or so we're led to believe. Consequently, when Jaffery is offered a prosecution in a court martial, Bose insists on going along. To this end, in an apparently pre-determined case, Bose gets stuck with the defense. Minnisha Lamba fills the gaps by being the social activist journalist who follows the case, and the slow transformation of Bose from indifferent adventurist to determined litigator.
Shaurya fails on several levels, and we can come back to those. Lets start with its attributes. The intent, mentioned before, is honorable. Highlighting the various flaws in the military hierarchy and the ultimate failure of fundamentalism were both noble intentions. Also, it's been ages since India has had a courtroom drama. Jaffery tries his best to be effective and honest in the first half-decent role he's been offered in over a decade. Unfortunately, however, these few good men just don't make the cut.
Even if we pretend that Lamba's yammering high-school girl journalist did not shriek like a pre-adolescent (only because her pretty face makes up for her lack of finesse in acting), we cannot pardon Rahul Bose and his cheerleader performance. Now if it were over-acting it would be understandable in the current scenario. What he delivers however is the HEIGHT of pseudo-intellectual rubbish. Not even a three year old could be confounded into believing that he himself believed for one second in the terrible lines he so badly performed. And lets face it, when you're re-creating a part that has Tom Cruise associated with it, you have to have an actor with that aura. One could easily imagine Shah Rukh or Aamir Khan (in the original A Few Good Men script, of course) doing a much better job. The worst performance however, was that of the universally hailed Kay Kay Menon. I may be biased, but given that his lines were DIRECT translations of Jack Nicholson's in the original, one comes to expect a powerful performance. Neither does Kay Kay impress you as a military man, nor does he have the inimitable shamelessness that only Nicholson can portray.
The film's biggest failing comes from its originator. Samar Khan writes a film in the complete reverse order. He lifts a script, and tries to film a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT scenario around it. This, for those that have watched the Rob Reiner film, makes the character of Kay Kay Menon a superfluous addition. The entire courtroom drama is also lost on us, and the lack of ingenuity of both the lawyers leaves us begging for a hero.
To sum it up, I'd recommend the same defense that Bose should've used right up-front. Use self defense, and stay away from this movie, unless of course, you haven't watched A Few Good Men. In that case, this may actually be worth a DVD viewing. ONCE. MAYBE.
I'd give it an abyssmal 5.5 on a scale of 1-10, only because it is far better than the likes of recent disasters Tashan and Race.
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