Raajneeti

Went and watched Raajneeti a few days ago. Again, a much anticipated movie, directed by Mr. Prakash Jha who generally turns out movies that are quite watchable. Mrityudand, Damul and Hip Hip Hurray! were others from his stable.

Raajneeti is one of the few movies I know that was well shot, the acting was fine, the story of Mahabharat meets Godfather with a nod to the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty was pretty strong as well and yet the movie managed the trick of giving you a hollow feeling tempered with relief that it was over.

There are some things one remembers from a movie and they seem to define what you feel about the movie.

For one, Raajneeti seemed to be full of one shot wonders. Any couple who had sex in the movie ended up with the woman getting pregnant. Awesome! I guess it also to some extent accounts for the 1 billion plus people we have - just means that India is full of crack shots. Coincidentally, shooting also happens to be the only individual gold we have ever won at the Olympics (as of the 2008 Beijng Games).

Another thing is that the movie had no songs. Throughout the movie I do not remember a single instance when folks dropped what they were doing and sang a song. Nobody sang. In my book that alone is worth a star in the rating points.

Third, there is a poignant scene in the movie where a mother faces her long lost son - one she pined for (minorly) and one that she never saw. She reveals the fact that she is his birth mother and asks him to come over to the side of her legitimate sons, his over-my-dead-body opponents. People would recognize him as Karna and the lady in question as Kunti from the Mahabharat. It is a powerful sequence in the epic. In the movie theatre, the entire audience was in splits. Maybe due to the extremely peculiar expression that the actress wore for the duration of the scene. Or due to the fact that the despite the movie being set in Modern India, this one scene had language heard solely on tacky period TV shows.

And then we come to the ending - underwhelming and a bit pointless. After all the Machiavellian manipulations and over-portrayed politico-gangland street violence in the movie I could not figure out why a shootout was engineered to kill the bad guy, why when all they had to do was to wait and he'd do the job himself. Maybe it was a nod to Duryodhan's slaying in the Mahabharat. Maybe it was something else. But I missed the point of it.

Compressing something of the scale of the Mahabharat into a couple of hours takes some doing and while Mr. Jha's attempt is commendable, you come away with the feeling that it is not 'done'. I can't put my finger on what is missing, but the major drawback is that the movie doesn't compel me to look for it either. I am glad it is over and that's that.

Katrina does well, but they could have hired a better speechwriter.
Nana Patekar for a change does not play himself.
Arjun Rampal does a good Sonny Corleone.
Manoj Bajpai starts off well, as always, but his slide into caricature-dom is terminal in the latter half of the movie.
Ajay Devgun plays himself. expected, I guess.

In all the movie there was one bit that I really liked - the lure for getting Manoj Bajpai to the shootout: they are changing ballot results from the new electronic voting machines over the internet. Awesome!