In a special league of dreary, bad films
Bollywood is a star-driven film industry. What that means and often results in are films like The Big Bull where just the fact that a big star has been engaged is enough, all else be damned. “All else” includes writing — story, screenplay and dialogue, direction, production design, background score.
Star-driven enterprises serve a very significant purpose. Inept writers, directors, production houses remain gainfully engaged by riding on the power of a star.
Abhishek Bachchan is a star who can act. He has just been beset by too many bad choices after a few good ones initially. This time round, however, he signed up with a director and writer who are in a special league of their own when it comes to being bad.
Bollywood has a large, prospering league of bad which ranges from films that are bad in unique, new ways — where it’s obvious that some thought, effort went into making it — to woeful, listless films which are bad in ways that many other previous films have been bad.
The first kind of films can be funbad, while the other is dreary.
To illustrate, Ram Gopal Varma’s Daud would fall in the fun-bad category, and Department in mournfully bad. Director Vijay Krishna Acharya’s Tashan is in the first category, but his Thugs of Hindostan is in the I’drather-die-than-watch-this category.
The Big Bull is a pool of mournful stupidity. A life-sucking bad film. The sort that leaves you in need of a cold shower and cold beer to wash it all away.
Leading this turgid enterprise is Kookie Gulati the director. He was set off on this listless path by a story and screenplay that he co-wrote with Arjun Dhawan.
Mr Kookie had earlier directed an atrocity called Prince (2010) that still feels like a fresh scar on my brain. Now I have two scars courtesy Mr Kookie.
B ased loosely and irresponsibly on the life and crimes of Harshad Mehra, The Big Bull opens with reporter Meera Rao (played by Ileana D’Cruz and based on Sucheta Dalal) talking about Hemant Shah (Abhishek Bachchan) to a hall full of millennial MBA students.
Cut to flashback in a chawl where Hemant, in full-sleeve printed shirts, used to live with his brother Viren (Sohum Shah), mother (Supriya Pathak) and angst about not being rich. That feeling was made worse by the father of the girl next door he liked, Priya (Nikita Dutta). Her daddy wanted a well-settled son-in-law.
We are told two things about Hemant. Three, actually.
1. That Hemant had “the world’s best bhai aur dost”. We meet the bhai, but see the dost fleetingly.
2. Hemant keeps saying, “Mujhe dheere chalna aata hain hai” – and yet the film he is in is an excruciatingly slow crawl.
3. Hemant doesn’t drink, but only till he can afford the best daru. Later in life, he drinks.
With these character traits, Mr Kookie & Co. try to stitch together a chronology of the rise and fall of the stock broker, but they remain vague on details and are often incoherent, as if a terrible arts student was suddenly asked to sit for an economics exam.
The film, neither clear nor really interested in what actually happened, tells us Harshad Mehta’s story in the sort of sketchy way that the arts student would try to fill up the answersheet — with gibberish, throwing in some “economics sounding” words at random.
Hemant wants to become a stock broker and for this he gets a bank receipt in an underhand manner and starts playing the stock market. The amount of the bank receipts increases, and so does Hemant’s game.
He then manipulates the price of a company’s share price and uses union leader Rana Sawant (Mahesha Manjrekar) to tip him off about which auto plant will be shut so that he can make more money in shares.
This is insider trading and Mannu Malpani (Saurabh Shukla), chairman of SEBI, doesn’t like it. But he can’t do much.
The film conveys all this through dull generalities. To show that Hemant was a master manipulator and the king of the share market, it makes him stand, arms akimbo, staring and smiling at the trading floor often. To show that he is always planning his next move, Hemant has to keep tapping his fingers.
In between there is romance with Priya, which means that several songs arrive at frustratingly predictable moments.
Soon Hemant gets very rich, pays Rs 26 cr income tax and the CBI and I-T guys get after him.
Hemant suspects that it is one of his employees and so he invites them all to his house and then asks them to take off their clothes and jump into his pool.
Half-naked office employees covering their man-boobs as Hemant stares down at them with a sulky pout is, perhaps, when the film hits the high note of absurdity.
Kookie & Co seem incapable of taking facts and then turning them into a screenplay. If they were capable of doing that they would have just binge-watched Hansal Mehta’s Scam 1992. They probably did watch it and decided it was all too much and that they’d rather go with a bullshit story and hero’s pointless bluster.
Abhishek Bachchan’s twitter handle is @juniorbachchan and so there is no getting away from the comparison. But, he has a personality that is entirely his own.
Chota Bachchan is all goodness, warmth and decency. So much so that when he tries to be evil or creepy, he has to ham it.
The film gives Abhishek a shitty start — a pouty, pretentious pose in a nightgown — that seals his character’s fate and tells us that we should not expect acting, just posturing.
The film is also confused between its love for Abhishek and the story it wants to tell. While The Big Bull wants to show Abhishek as a good guy, a “dreamer” who helped many people make money, the story of Hemant — a manipulator of people and money who had little regard for rules — keeps peeing on its party.
So the film can only muster the courage to make its star sit with a manspread and thrust his stomach out to convey indecency and greed. Sometimes it also makes him laugh out loud, without any reason or explanation.
U sually, even in bad films, there are actors who can act. No such luck here.
Sohum Shah is a decent actor but he has been given nothing here except to be the voice of nagging worry.
Supriya Pathak has spent so much time in the world of Tarak Mehta Ka Ulta Chashma and Khichdi that she now seems incapable of doing anything else.
Ileana D’Cruz has mastered the art of speaking without letting her lips move. Despite that she is not bad. It says a lot about a film and its actors if Ms D’Cruz is the one redeeming thing that comes to mind.