Audience get a raw deal!

Mundane Sequels, over rated makers and rehashed songs! 2017 is a horror so far!

Call me the typical Bollywood fan guy, but I had better hopes from ‘Commando 2’. In fact, not just ‘Commando 2’, when 2017 had started I had great expectations from Bollywood. The first quarter promised heavy duty names and some great banners coming out with long anticipated movies. All that has crashed and how! So far it has been a year of, politely, put disappointments. Let’s take a few cases.

The first heavy duty disappointment came from Shaad Ali, who is the unofficial PHd in Bollywood for Mani Ratnam remakes. To be fair to him he did a fair job of remaking Mani Ratnam's ‘Alaipayuthey’, and that one made reasonable money and also had Vivek Oberoi elevated as the "next big thing".

Shaad Ali came back with a remake of ‘O Kadhal Kanmani’, a movie which re-established Mani Ratnam as the king of romance yet again down south, but fact of the matter is ‘OK Jaanu’ was as dragging as drag can get.

To add salt to the wounds of the bored audiences, who suffered the movie, chart busting foot tapper from the 1990s ‘humma humma’ was presented in a rehash, which had pathetic choreography. ‘Ok Jaanu’ sank without a trace at the box office. For those of us, who look forward to cinematic stuff from Mani Ratnam with a certain quality expectation, ‘OK Jaanu’ was a shocker.

Then came the movie that made even ‘OK Jaanu’ look like, ‘Gone with the Wind’. Vishal Bharadwaj's 170-odd minute unedited arrogant torture called ‘Rangoon’. ‘Rangoon's biggest achievement in my book was that it made the screenplay writer of ‘OK Jaanu’ look like Salim-Javed. Rangoon was a typical example of the Dean going on a holiday and asking his peon to manage the university for an year. A talented spot boy could probably make better stuff than ‘Rangoon’.

A movie, which had parallel plots that could have put the Mahabharata to shame got lost in justifying screen space for almost everyone, who had signed up for the movie. The only one, who did not get a fair deal in the process, was the guy who sat in the theater.

‘Commando 2’ had a sizeable chunk of audience waiting for it. The purists and the Khan obsessed media will not acknowledge this, but the initial three days’ numbers of ‘Commando 2’ at the box office suggest that Vidyut Jamwal has much better fan following than we think he has, and the makers in Bollywood need to use him better.

‘Commando 2’ totally killed the goodwill of its original predecessor, which had a super good guy vs bad guy clash. Probably Deven Bhojani just did not have the vision of Dilip Ghosh. To those of us, who felt that if ‘Commando2’ could atleast be as good as the original, we would have got a better action thriller franchise, sadly, it was not to be.

The other trend that has caught on is to get a chart buster from the 1990s or 1980s or 1970s and send it to the slaughterhouse of remix. Get a latest heroine or hero sway to it, who might have truck loads of screen charm, but will ensure, they together make a joke of themselves and the song too.

Look at the audience’s reaction; almost all movies with rehashed classics being put into them are bombing - probably an indication to the music director that the audiences probably prefer an original ‘nashe si chadh gayi’ over ‘tu cheez badi hai mast mast’.

If, to wake up a dead horse, Bollywood is going song rehash way - it will not work. Those who loved the song initially will end up comparing the latest pair with the chemistry of the original, and chances are they will find the current pair in the song wanting and those, who go without any such bias will not connect with the natural mismatch of current music with the past. Result - everyone gets nothing.

Bollywood is slowly reaching the end of the strategy of large screen releases and promotion wave. Slowly the audiences are seeing through the strategy of half baked content being pushed to them by stars by aggressively promoting it via the multiple media.

The first quarter of 2017 has therefore been a very sad story of high-rated makers becoming a shadow of their former selves. Sequels being sold to us because the producers wanted to make a few crores through ‘across the table’ deals like TV rights etc. We the audiences have had a raw deal until now in 2017.