No comeback from here

Govinda’s much touted comeback film ‘Aa Gaya Hero’ did not perform as expected, raising a question why most of the comeback films are duds

‘Aa Gaya Hero’, the latest Govinda movie came and became ‘Chala Gaya Hero’ even before you could say Friday. If you were a teenager or a college-going cool kid or an office going young professional in the 1990s in India, chances are you were also a Govinda fan. No one ruled the fun film genre like this pocket dictionary sized dynamite.

His partnership with David Dhawan was one of the high points of 1990s cinema. So when my kind of fans saw the trailer of ‘Aa Gaya Hero’, the decision not to watch it was instant and immediate. I would rather live with the memories of Govinda from ‘Ilzaam’ to ‘Hatya’ to ‘Hum’ to ‘Partner’. I would not pain myself and insult the brilliance of Govinda by watching a movie, where a great screen blazer ended up becoming a pale shadow of his former screen gladiator self.

One often wonders - are these comeback movies or should they actually be called “go back” movies. My first memory of such an attempt was the 1990s ‘Aandhiyan’, coincidentally directed by David Dhawan.

This movie was publicised heavily by its makers as the comeback movie of the queen of 60s and 70s - Mumtaz. ‘Aandhiyan’ could not manage a whiff of a breeze at the box office and became a windless Bermuda triangle. So bad was its failure that Prosenjit, a big name in Bengali cinema, was never given a second chance by Bollywood makers.

The second movie, which established a simple fact to me that a superstar with mass following should never call any movie his comeback movie was the dud called ‘Mrityudaata’ directed by Indian cinema's big daddy director of hyper emotions Mehul Kumar. The movie was Amitabh Bachchan's comeback vehicle. The frenzy was huge. Friday morning they released it as ‘Mrityudata’ and by evening the fans called it “Mrityudodo”.

I don't even want to talk about ‘Gulab Gang’ and ‘Aaja Nachle’, Madhuri Dixit's “go back” sorry “comeback” movies. Why do come back movies fail? The reasons are simple. The directors in most cases are fanboys or another wannabe trying to make it big on somehow recreating a superstar's lost glory.

In the process the most important factor, content gets ignored. Most filmmakers fail to realise that when they decide to bring back a superstar of huge fan loyalty back on the silver screen they have won half the battle but with bad content or a rehash of what the actor did decades ago they are losing the rest half so badly that it totally makes the other half success zero too.

Very rarely in a ‘Sarkar’ or a ‘Khoon Bhari Maang’, a director makes a super combo of a yesteryear performer's aura with super paced screen content and in the process ends up writing a place for himself in cinema history.

This is the irony. The director just has to place good content and pre/post production team. The numbers are ensured, old fans will surely pay a visit when the trailer looks good and the new fan will be curious about how an old war horse delivered in his time and days. Call it laziness or sheer half-hearted commitment to their own craft that most directors end up ensuring that comeback movies remain ‘go back’ movies.

The biggest crime, of these "go back" filmmakers, is they demotivate and shake the confidence of great performers too. God knows when Govinda will end up collecting the courage to face the camera again. Actors tend to blame themselves for makers error. In the process, both fans and cinema lose.

Maybe one day a clever superstar will ask a comeback producing wannabe this, “What’s your plan? What’s the story?”