The Hindu Business Line : Misses... all the way

With virtually every Bollywood film bombing at the box-office, it looks like this year is going to be one long dry spell of misses for the industry.

A still from the film, Khakee.

Last month was an unusually busy one for Bollywood, with the opening of nine films, much more than the norm for January. But not one has hit the mark at the box office. And the industry is back to grappling with the question: what is it that viewers want?

It seems that even Amitabh Bachchan is not the saviour that the trade is looking for. Rajkumar Santoshi's Rs 30 crore Khakee, which top-lined Bachchan along with other dependable stars like Ajay Devgan, Akshay Kumar and Aishwarya Rai, got a bumper opening: Vishal, one of the biggest capacity cinemas in the capital with over a thousand seats, recorded a Rs 10 lakh collection in the first four days. An inexplicable slide began the very next day, and now, in its second week, exhibitors are busy wondering what went wrong. Girish Johar, marketing head of Eros Group which owns Vishal, puts its pithily: "I feel Santoshi got confused about whether he wanted to cater to A class centres or B and C centres, and he ended up pleasing neither the masses nor the classes."

Aetbaar, another film with Bachchan in the lead, released back-to-back that same Friday. From the first day's miserable showing, it was clear that no one was interested in the product; not in the multiplexes, nor in the single-screen cinemas, which took it on hoping for at least a strong weekend initial.

The standard practice all over the world is that no two big movies open the same day, because audiences get split. In this instance, however, it was obvious that the level of disinterest in Aetbaar, directed by Vikram Bhatt had nothing to do with Bachchan. It had everything to do with what the movie smelled like... rank bad.

Bhatt's last outing (Intehaa) starred a trio of newcomers in a film about obsessive love, ripped off from a Hollywood movie. Aetbaar is again about an obsessive young man who makes life hell for the woman he loves. John Abraham and Bipasha Basu who starred in Jism, Bhatt's only success in the past two years, play the romantic leads; Bachchan is the concerned father who tries very hard to keep the wrong one at bay.

The mistakes leap out at you from the beginning. Bipasha is all wrong for the part: What the film needed was an actress who can convincingly appear vulnerable, not someone who has proved to be effective only when she is allowed to flaunt her more-than-ample assets. Abraham comes across in exactly the same manner as before, with not one new expression. Couple this with a slack script and direction that has no bounce and the result is a disaster that not even Bachchan, who is practically in every frame, can prevent.

It's harder to figure the non-performance of Khakee. Traditionally, actioners do well across the board, especially in the smaller towns of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, and Khakee, a stylish cops-and-terrorist story has some excellently crafted action sequences. Where it loses out to the more rough-and-tumble tales is in its reluctance to go the whole hog: Unexpected twists in the tale and a deliberately different take on the standard cop figure are a critic's delight, but serve only to befuddle the average viewer.

Bachchan, whom people still revere as the feistycop of Zanjeer and a host of other movies, is shown here as ageing and largely ineffectual; Akshay Kumar does ripple his muscles, but also plays the buffoon, and a third, much younger policeman is shown to be plagued by self-doubt.

According to an insider, whose job is to collate figures at various centres in the country, another thing that goes against the film is the non-conventional track of the heroine. Aishwarya Rai dresses down (she appears throughout the film in one set of clothes), and reveals herself, in the end, to be not-such-a-good girl after all. That's an interesting turn that makes her a delight to watch, but again, what she does is anti-image. All she's played till now, and has gained mass acceptance while she's been at it, is the angelic heroine who can do no wrong.

The third, and the most damaging element of the film, commercially speaking, is that the bad guys are just not bad enough. Ajay Devgan's villain doesn't quite cut it; nor do the others — one is a corrupt cop, and the other an ambitious politician. The good guys aren't bright white knights, either. Too many shades of grey are Santoshi's undoing. A huge pity, because this is one of the better films from a director who has always been worth watching for the way he tells a story and builds up a mood.

So, down goes a film that looks and sounds repetitive (Aetbaar). As well as one that attempts something different, but doesn't quite fulfil expectations (Khakee). The same story is repeated with a small film, whose USP is that it has been produced by industrialist Vijaypat Singhania. When the promos of Woh Tera Naam Tha started flashing on TV, it seemed like this was the usual run-of-the-mill `violent love story' in which the lovers face opposition from horrid parents.

In many ways, it is worse. The film, which introduces four new faces, is set in the 1950s, which would have been fine if it said something worthwhile. But the execution, by director Kuku Kohli who specialises in this genre, is unbelievably dated. The characters are made to declaim their largely Urdu flavoured lines in a highly theatrical fashion, and the climax has houses being burnt and bodies being charred, something that went blissfully out of fashion back in the 1970s. At the pre-launch festivities in New Delhi, Singhania, chairman emeritus of the Raymond group, appeared completely confident of his offering.

There are 500 filmmakers in the industry, if they all knew what would work, why would only five or six films be successful, he queried in return to my question about his choice of director, and subject. "Sometimes, in life, you have to take a gamble," he said, "I did speak to a few people, and chose Kohli because he works well with newcomers. And this is a film that is very close to my beliefs. There has to be something different about a film for it to work, and I like to think that I've done something different."

Well, the verdict is out. Two weeks on, Woh Tera Naam Tha is doing just about average business in the small towns; in the metros, it is a washout.

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