11 April,2024 07:14 AM IST | Mumbai | Mohar Basu
A still from Bade Miyan Chote Miyan
There's a certain grammar to action blockbusters. Till yesterday, I was of the belief that Ali Abbas Zafar is amongst the few directors who is thorough with the Wren & Martin of action movies. I deduced it from the fact that his Tiger Zinda Hai had two breathtaking sequences - one, Salman Khan's entry scene where he takes on a pack of wolves, and second, Katrina Kaif being an absolute killing machine for 10 minutes straight for which she was trained by Tom Struthers and Buster Reeves, who had choreographed action sequences in Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises. To pack in two of recent times' most memorable action pieces within the span of the same film is serious skill. Which is why Bade Miyan Chote Miyan is seriously baffling. It's not an outrightly terrible film. There is merit, mettle and magnificence - the three solid Ms of a blockbuster. Two of Bollywood's biggest action stars - Akshay Kumar and Tiger Shroff - headline the film. Prithviraj Sukumaran is Bane-ing to perfection. BMCM is just a reminder that it takes a village to make a good film and this village, despite genuine effort and all the good intentions, fails to do so.
BMCM is about a save-the-country mission headlined by two of the country's best agents - Freddy (Akshay Kumar) and Rocky (Tiger Shroff). Freddy is the big daddy with little f'''s to give; Rocky is sprightly, spirited and has a notorious sense of humour laced with irreverence. They team up to fight a common enemy - which I am so glad isn't Pakistan (for a change). There is a revenge seeker called Kabir on the loose. After a proposal to supply military robots is turned down, he sets out to wreak havoc on India. Kabir (Prithviraj Sukumaran) kidnaps Priya (Sonakshi Sinha), who holds the top-secret codes for a shield protecting India from external threats. Freddy and Rocky are formidable warriors who have served in the Indian Army. Assisting Freddy and Rocky are intelligence agent Nisha (Manushi Chillar) and expert hacker Pammi (Alaya F). I would love to explain what happens next but the problem is that at close to three hours, the film is so painfully long that I lost interest. And most of it is gibberish. So blah blah, soldiers get cloned and are able to heal themselves, blah blah, a human doubles up as a hard drive, blah blah Freddy and Rocky save India in three days.
I am being neither dramatic nor exaggerating when I tell you how hackneyed the plot is. So that the makers of this film don't think I am being too simple-minded to understand BMCM, I got on a call with my friend - an AI scientist in the UK - to confirm if the film had any ounce of sense. I asked him - "Can a human being be a hard drive?" His response - "Huh? That sentence is wrong." He is right; even MS Word suggests the sentence be rewritten. Is Human cloning for real? He explains, "No, human cloning isn't real yet. Organs have been cloned, I think. But not successfully used." The call ended with a very worried question from him - "Why does a human being need to be a hard drive?" How do I tell him that Indian screenwriters are going places that even scientists are unable to make sense of.
Despite everything that's not working for the film, which I admit is a lot, I was able to find a few things that did. The action though mindless is flawless. You do enjoy watching heavy vehicles toppling over and things getting blown up. Tiger Shroff gets a few great lines including one about nepotism in terrorism. Akshay Kumar aces stunts like only he knows how to. Manushi can break bones and Alaya F is doing the one thing no one else is : having a good time. I was pleased to see no one sermonising about deshbhakti and how it should be done. Writers Aditya Basu and Zafar give you so much that you feel little as the film zooms to the finish line.
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The good thing is I didn't end up with a headache, which isn't something I can say about a lot of action films lately. But what I did feel was this surge of disappointment. The film suffers from a vision problem. It is almost as if the makers didn't know what they were going for. There is a bit of everything and a whole lot of nothing. The chemistry between the leads wears thin as the plot gets more complex. The film has a template that feels familiar. Though it plays out like a comic book, the humour isn't punchy enough. Its social commentary is half-baked. And mostly, it comes at a time when we have had an overfill of the genre itself. We have seen far too many aggressive actioners in every shape, form, size relentlessly for a few years now, on every platform and screen possible. BMCM might be the first victim of this action fatigue. To everyone who is making movies today, here's a line in the film that really hit home - âbiceps ki jagah brains ka istemaal karo'. Where are the good stories?
