Agneepath: It’s all in a name

It is ironic that my very first review on this blog is of a film that is a remake of classic, I’ve grown up watching. I’ll still try to be objective, but do overlook an occasional lapse.

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What is in a name, right? In Karan Johar’s Agneepath of 2012, Mandwa could have been Diu instead of a mythical island off the coast of Mumbai where the sun never shines. Vijay could have been Ajay, Master Dinanath could have been Master Hariprasad and Kaancha could have been Kunvar. This is the thing about Agneepath. It is a completely standalone story that could have been “Pratishod” or “Krodh” and it wouldn’t have mattered much.

The movie starts like the original; with the altruistic Master Dinanath Chauhan who has a penchant for speaking like Dharmendra of Satyakam and for quoting the poem, Agneepath. The déjà vu, though, ends when the Masterji dies and Vijay opts for a rather low profile burial than taking the dead body on a cart while chanting Agneepath and cremating it.

Thereafter the story moves to Mumbai from where the story takes a completely different turn. I’ll just stick to the discrepancies here. In this Agneepath, Vijay is more calculative and cunning. He has no qualms about dealing with drugs. He seems to have a lot of public support simply by financing an ambulance and Kaali’s (Priyanka Chopra) Chinese beauty parlour. He is also the more brooding type who continues to be haunted by his childhood. This somehow shaves off a lot of dimensions from the character. But just when you become comfortable to this Vijay, he turns around and inexplicably becomes a super-hero who can still pull up a guy like Sanjay Dutt after being stabbed multiple times!

The patience-testing Krishnan Iyer (YemYeah) of 1990 has thankfully been done away with. Plenty of characters have been tweaked to make way for Rauf Lala (the magnificent Rishi Kapoor) and the audience is indebted to director Karan Malhotra for the same. Sanjay Dutt as Kancha Cheena is on precarious grounds. He looks menacing when he laughs and snorts but falls flat when he’s chanting shlokas from Gita. Priyanka Chopra is relegated to being a pretty but irritating dancing extra. Hrithik Roshan…hmmm.. I personally feel that he was a bit of miscast in this movie. I’m not being biased towards lineage, but I really feel that Abhishek Bachchan could have lent more gravity to Vijay Dinanath Chauhan. Zarina Wahab as Vijay’s mother is a major letdown. She doesn’t stand her ground and you never really trust her allegiance. Owing to an obvious ‘liking’ that I have for Katrina, I shall resist the temptation to comment on her ‘item song’. 🙂

Technically, the movie looks good. The set design (especially the Mumbai of yore) by Sabu Cyril is great. Production values are consistent throughout. The dialogues pass muster. All the ingredients are there but they just don’t add up to the desired taste. It is in the destiny of every remake to be compared to its original at least in terms of memorable scenes, characters or dialogues. In the Agneepath of 1990, I had “aaj sham 6 baje maut ke saath apna apilment hai”, “yeh ladka, chingari!” and “Dinkar Rao, Topi sambhaal” among others; In Agneepath of 2012, I only remembered Rauf Lala and Chikni Chameli. Now what do you make of a film in which you only remember the secondary villain and the item girl? Agneepath, I feel, would have been better off with some other name.

Rating: 6/10 (Watch it, if you haven’t watched the Mukul Anand classic)