It’s action time

The all-out masala action potboiler, propelled by the bone-crunching and skull-cracking exploits of a glib and tough hero, has helped Bollywood rediscover an old mantra for boxoffice success, writes Saibal Chatterjee

From left: With Wanted, Bodyguard and Ready, Salman Khan has rewritten the boxoffice rules

It’s been a sudden explosion. Indian moviegoers, like they were eons ago, are Ready once again to sway to the beat of a brash Bodyguard and exult to the roar of a sanguine Singham. So, it is raining hits in Bollywood. Heroes with bulging biceps and pampered pectorals are knocking the stuffing out of all competition at the boxoffice. And Hindi cinema is back where it was in the 1980s — celebrating the unassailable male protagonist, a tough cookie with raging fire in his belly and unquenchable ire in his soul. Action is back with a bang, folks!

Aamir Khan’s Ghajini had put the zing back into Mumbai showbiz; and (right) Ajay Devgn-starrer Singham was crammed with action sequences

With the hoi polloi returning in droves to single-screen theatres in the metros as well as in tier-two and tier-three cities to lap up a new crop of hardcore action flicks endorsed by the biggest stars of Mumbai showbiz, a movie industry that was seemingly in the process of building a fresh future for itself around the burgeoning multiplexes has gone in for a quick change in course.

A slew of Bollywood megastars like Aamir Khan, Salman Khan, Ajay Devgn and Hrithik Roshan, all beefed up, have pulled out all stops in lending their weight to a genre that, until recently, appeared to be in danger of extinction. As a result, the good-old good vs. evil potboilers are back with a bang. And we certainly aren’t referring only to the films of a shirtless Sallu. There is much more action that is unfolding in this expanding space.

Flaunting toned torsos, these invincible men march into battle, sometimes armed; at others fighting the villain with bare knuckles. No matter what the situation is, they always win. Technically and texturally, the action movies of this era are streets ahead of the rough-and-ready masala entertainers of the 1970s and 1980s. But they are driven by the same ‘anything goes’ spirit.

In Dabangg, Salman Khan is an action hero with a heart of gold

For several years, as Mumbai’s mainstream filmmakers experimented with a wide sweep of themes and ideas, and NRI romances outran all other genres, mass-oriented action potboilers were relegated somewhat to the fringes, with only second-string Bollywood male stars lending their names to such projects. Masala became a dirty word. But Salman, with Wanted, Dabangg and Bodyguard, and Aamir, with Ghajini, have rewritten the script. Masala is magic today.

Hindi cinema is witnessing a deluge of masala action potboilers aimed at a section of the audience that was not inadequately served by the so-called multiplexes movies. A film like Delhi Belly might have sent the youthful metropolitan swish set into raptures, but it was all wrong for an audience fed on a staple of disco dancer movies and raunchy Bhojpuri comedies.

This segment of the audience had begun to turn its back on Hindi cinema, which led to the rise of made-on-the-cheap Bhojpuri films. But with Salman Khan throwing his shirt and caution to the winds, these moviegoers are now back into the Bollywood fold.

Ask Rohit Shetty, director of the Golmaal series and this year’s smash hit, Singham, why he loves blowing up cars on the big screen, and his answer is as uncomplicated as his work, "I do it for the audience, not for the critics," he says.

And that, Shetty asserts, explains why the high-voltage cop-and-hoodlum action flick is "a superhit with a one-and-a-half-star rating". The director agrees that masala movies are back with a vengeance. "The response of the audience to Singham says it all," he avers.

Ghajini and Dabangg may have aroused some enthusiasm among movie critics, but films like Ready, Singham and Bodyguard had that hard-to-please breed squirming. But as Shetty says about Singham, "the important thing is that the masses have liked it".

The kind of mass-oriented filmmaking credo that Shetty represents has brought masala action movies back into vogue in Bollywood. Singham, remake of a Tamil hit of the same name, was crammed with action sequences involving a dramatically pumped-up Ajay Devgn. The masses loved what they saw and the film ended up making more than Rs 100 crore from the boxoffice.

Singham is, of course, only one of the many no-holds-barred Hindi potboilers that have struck gold in the past three years.

Coming at the end of a string of debilitating commercial disasters in 2007-2008 that nearly derailed Bollywood, the Aamir Khan-starrer, Ghajini, remake of a Tamil film which, in turn, was a rip-off from Christopher Nolan’s Hollywood thriller, Memento, put the zing back into Mumbai showbiz.

At that point, Ghajini looked like a flash in the pan that had raked in big bucks because of the marketing aggressiveness that went into promoting the film. But in 2009, Boney Kapoor produced Wanted, directed by Prabhu Devaa and starring Salman Khan as a ruthless undercover agent, who stops at nothing to get his job done.

It was another unalloyed action potboiler that reminded the audience of similar flicks of the 1980s, which were underlined by a simple good vs. evil logic that allowed an invincible hero to take on the baddie and his henchmen without batting an eyelid and emerging triumphant.

Bodyguard is, in a way, an extension of Salman’s Wanted and Dabangg persona: an action hero with a heart of gold but given to ways that often border on the cynical. His connect with fans at the mass level has few parallels. All that Salman needs to do to get people on his side is to walk into a frame, preferably sans a shirt but with loads of attitude.

Others have since clambered on to the gravy train and churned out high-octane action movies about tough cops and wronged innocents. Audiences have already been treated to Ghajini, Dabangg, Ready and Bodyguard.

There are more such films on the way. Among them is Karan Johar’s remake of the 1990 Amitabh Bachchan-starrer, Agneepath, with Hrithik Roshan playing the vengeance-seeking protagonist, and the Saif Ali Khan-produced spy thriller, Agent Vinod.

It is easy to understand the whys and wherefores of this trend. The Mumbai movie industry’s undisputed hit machine, Salman Khan, who is currently riding the crest of a wave, believes that his primary responsibility as an actor and an entertainer is towards the ticket-buying public.

"The audience must like what I do on the screen. Only then am I satisfied," says the one-time enfant terrible of the Mumbai movie industry when he is reminded of the critical brickbats that his last two releases have received.

Even Nishikant Kamat, who burst on the scene in 2006 with the National Award-winning Marathi film Dombivali Fast and followed it up with the critically acclaimed Mumbai Meri Jaan, has thrown his hat into the ring. His latest film, Force, starring John Abraham as a hard-as-nails anti-narcotics agent, is a remake of the 2003 Tamil action film, Kaakha Kaakha.

It is significant that all the Bollywood action superhits of the past three years have been remakes of Tamil films. So, obviously, originality has been sacrificed at the altar of big bucks. No matter how you look at it, releases like Ready and Bodyguard have been answers to the fervent prayers of moviegoers, who find elitist multiplex films a touch too low-key for their tastes.

In the South, especially in Tamil Nadu, action potboilers never ever lost their currency, thanks to the towering impact of the one and only Rajinikanth who, on the screen, could summon any power to do exactly as he pleased. Five years ago, a storyless Hindi film like Bodyguard might have left Mumbai movie fans cold. But not anymore, especially when the concoction has the backing of someone like Salman Khan.

Three years ago, Wanted made nearly Rs 100 crore. Last year, Dabangg almost crossed the Rs 150-crore mark. A large percentage of their business came from single-screen theatres in smaller cities and towns. In fact, as much 70 per cent of the collection that Singham registered countrywide came from single-screen theatres. The balance of showbiz dynamics is clearly shifting.

Chulbul Pandey of Dabanng and Bajirao Singham of Singham are thunderous characters reminiscent of the Hindi movie heroes of yore, men who could swagger like Deewar’s Amitabh Bachchan into a cavernous godown, lock it from inside and then proceed to beat the daylights out of a band of rough goons without batting an eyelid.

Such heroics worked wonders back then; they strike a similar chord even today. The reason is obvious: the deep popular disillusionment with the political system that gave birth to Hindi cinema’s angry young man is on the rise again as corruption and inequity run amok in this country. So, when Singham and his men corner an exploitative politician in his lair and kick him on the backside, the masses go into a collective frenzy, clapping and whistling in the aisles. Beware the fury of the underdog!