Kiss kiss, bang bang
Khalid Mohamed about this return to Mumbai’s meanest streets, circa the late 1970s and ’ 80s, when underworld warfare had assumed Leviathan proportions. And the startling news is director Gupta’s retro-gangs-ofWadalapur is pretty strong stuff, extremely involving in parts and belted out with an astonishing amount of technical flourish.
Indeed, the first-half holds you in a vice-like grip literally. The attention paid to the details of another era is impressive, be it in the recreation of the tense atmophere in the mohallas, a stately police force chamber ridden with hidden agendas, the authentic costumes and the set décor. The behind-thescenes production design team deserves an unconditional applause.
Advertent references to Amitabh Bachchan’s odes to violence are employed by the director to point out that the antsy young man phenomenon, indeed, led to impressionable minds being heavily influenced by the characters he portrayed in Zanjeer, Muqaddar ka Sikandar, Deewar — in which grabbing the law in one’s hands appeared to be the only means to gain justice.
A bold point is made on the impact of such an ideology, but it’s left dangling in the air. But naturally, the overriding concentration is on zeroing in on stranger-than-fiction elements from journalist Hussain Zaidi’s book From Dongri to Dubai. For once, Sanjay Gupta doesn’t go crazy with jump-cuts and flashmatazz. Instead he narrates a story with a terrific opening, a sagging middle (alas) and redeemingly, an end which for once doesn’t cackle that crime doesn’t pay. It does.
The enterprise banks on its central character, Manya Surve (John Abraham), an innocent soul driven by circumstances to crime. After a jail-break, bank robberies and more, he sets up a gang of deadly derelicts (Tusshar Kapoor and assorted scruffies) to oppose the ruling mafia.
Shootout at Wadala is sufficiently grippring and endowed with visceral energy.
Of the cast, Manoj Bajpai handicapped by an underdeveloped role, still manages to vault over the script. As a brash, cocksure gangster, he’s first-rate. Anil Kapoor is reliably top class.
John Abraham dominates the show, both with his melting eye language and Sylvester Stallone physique. Manya Surve is said to have been a small-built man but then movie stars can’t be shorn of the glamour quotient? This is not to take away from Abraham’s tour de force performance. He’s a revelation, and has reached the next level as an actor. Gratifyingly, Gupta doesn’t glorify Surve. He is presented as someone whose life spiralled out of control, more of a doomed figure than a wonder hero. And that’s what makes Shootout at Wadala, quite a few cuts above the commonplace.