Shootout at Lokhandwala

The last few weeks, we have seen relentless promotion of this so-called 'based on true rumors' cinema trumpeted as a film that will uncover a lot that the public does not know and should, about the six hour gore fest that occured at a Lokhandwala building complex in the summers of 1990.
Scenes from the horrendous encounter interspersed with Tusshar Kapoor serenading a bar dancer with a now standard 'beedi jalaile' item song have been flashing on our television screens with almost no respite these few days.
For me, the presence of so many bollywood bigwigs in the movie was a sureshot indicator that it would be anything but real. Come on, when you a multistarrer, its bound to be a masala pot boiler with a lot of histrionics and cliched schmaltz of sentimentality that I have grown up with. I was right, entirely right but as it turned out, it wasn't as bad as I thought the above factors would make it to be.
It sure is no groundbreaking cinema. It most probably is not even close to what actually transpired, notwithstanding the fervent claims of its makers. What I like about the movie, is that it almost does not take sides, that is, right until the end, when the ticker rolling before the credits boast that subsequent to the inception of the Anti-Terror-Squad, crime rates in Mumbai fell by 70% year on year. But even this, leaves you with a dilemma, if you care about taking sides that is.
On one hand, you have a group of policemen, a breed constantly ridiculed and upbraided for its impotency in the wake of spiralling crime rates, who decide that they have had enough with the political corruption and debauchery that stymies them and take matters into their own hand.
Their claim is that the only thing that can deter the gangsters is a police-force that also terrorises them and the encounter on that eventful day did send a chill through the ranks of the undercover. You could argue here that the correct solution to the issue here would have been a robust law and order machinery where justice is assured and swift. But tell that to a man on the streets of Mumbai and even the most naive of them would snigger at you. 'It is not practical' a wiser man would bellow. And isn't that actually true ? The time it would take us to overhaul our criminal justice system is really indeterminate. When he haven't done it in the last 60 years what says we would manage to do it now ? Is it fair, to have an entire generation of people live in terror until then ? We want solutions and we want it now. And as the statistics indicate, the problem WAS solved to a large extent.
On the flip side, clinical execution of the anti-social elements in so called encounters threatens the whole fabric of civil society. In a civil society, everyone has a right to defend himself, people have a right to life, a right to mend ways, to undo their sins against humanity. This is the mechanism that actually ultimately protects the innocent. You give the police too much power and you risk warping their minds, elevating them to demi-god status with nobody pulling their strings whatsoever. A civil society survives on a system of checks and balances and what you do when you give your protectors a free whip is that you make them accountable to none. And in a real world, there always will be bad apples in a group and if their is no mechanism to pluck that out, you are inviting chaos.

My point here is that the movie successfully depicts this paradox and that is why I liked it. Its not a battle between good and evil. The distinction gets blurry when you see the police henchmen ruthlessly kill one gangster after another after you have seen them repenting their sins in their last moments.

That's how I saw the film on the philosophical level.
On the technical level, the movie does not let you down. The screenplay is tacky for the most part. The dialogues are exactly that. Each line an actor utters is a typical masala dialogue meant for the lower stalls. Most of the songs are soporific except the rap song. The acting of the policemen and Vivek Oberoi are good, the rest are disappointing.

There is however one thing, that for me atleast has become a sore issue now. The lack of originality in style. Its easy to see that the style is new for Indian cinema but standard staple in Hollywood movies. The camera work, some of the scenes, some of the relationships are direct lifts from the myriad Hollywood gangster flicks.

In the final analysis, I would say you might like this movie if you havent watched too many Hollywood movies like I have.

P.S. - There is one scene where Vivek Oberoi playing Maya Dolas makes a man support himself on his teeth on a ledge laying on his stomach and then crushes him down. Its brutal gut wrenching scene and I saw it executed in exactly the same fashion in a recent episode of that great gangster tv series, Sopranos. Season 6, episode 19.

, in the process becoming something that at times is very difficult to separate from the gangsters themselves