Bodyguard: Movie Review

By Vinay Charaniya

ACTING THE NON ACTING

The day shows are all housefull. The 11 pm show at one of the malls with large seating capacity is housefull. Families in hordes are entering the hall, couples are there too and so are youngsters from hostels of the nearby IIT. It is Eid ofcourse and there is a Salman Khan film, ofcourse!

Bodyguard, as has been the case with recent Salman films (Wanted, Ready) is a remake of a South film, the director – Siddique, at the helm for both the Tam and Mallu versions (have seen neither).

Though I am not a hardcore Salman fan, I did enjoy the two remakes mentioned above and also, the now cult, Dabangg. Primarily because they were entertaining movies, Bodyguard sadly, is the least entertaining of the lot. It is hardly any fun and in major portions is plain irritating!

Lovely Singh (Salman) is the bodyguard to Divya madam (Kareena Kapoor) as she faces the wrath of goons who want revenge against her righteous father Sartaj Rana (Raj Babbar). Lovely owes his life to ‘maalik’ Raj Babbar who had saved his then pregnant mother in an accident thereby saving our hero too. So off goes the tight uniform wearing Bodyguard accompanying Miss Colourful Pathani suits and salwars to her college. Angry at the constant following, Kareena comes up with the plan to make our puffed-up-gait hero to fall in love and in true Bollywood tradition ends up actually falling for him. Their romance blooms between baddies getting bashed.

In the middle of all this takes place one of the most annoying debut acts in recent memory by Rajat Rawail as Tsunami. In each of his recent superhit films, the onus of entertaining the audience with silly jokes has been led by Salman himself accompanied by decent actors (Mahesh Manjrekar, Sharat Saxena n co). But unfortunately for the viewer, in this particular Salman fest, the burden is entirely passed on to ‘Tsunami’ and boy, does he manage to test your patience. Sample this; among many such similar things, the makers of this film expect the viewer to be laughing his heart out on seeing Tsunami cooling his backside in front of a fan or when this obese creature is running shirtless displaying his man breasts.  How is this even remotely funny, I have no clue. Scarily, parts of the audience were finding it funny.

Meanwhile, Salman does the customary act of single handedly finishing up the bad guys with his shirt ripping off in another innovative manner. I guess a few more films later, if the different ways in which Sallu’s shirt has been ripped in the climax scenes is documented, a very amusing list would be prepared!

The music by Himesh Reshammiya (and Pritam for I Love You) is decent with couple of well picturised songs. Though like the movie itself, the music is nowhere close to Dabangg or even Ready. But I must admit that this was the first movie in which I was actually eagerly awaiting the song break to provide relief from the Tsunami rubbish on screen.

Among the performances, Salman is his usual self. Not acting the acting part (actually sounds like one of his dialogues na?!) he is as expected the heart of the movie and the reason for its bumper opening and perhaps it’s would be successful run too. Kareena Kapoor, looking extremely pretty throughout the movie, puts in a fine performance. In the last few scenes she manages to connect with the audience and makes them feel for her.  I don’t know about her no.1 claim but she is certainly among the better actresses of this generation. A special mention for Karishma Kapoor, as the voice that makes Salman fall in love, she is as seductive as ever.

Coming to the ending of the movie, had it stopped at the point where Salman had single handedly decimated the villains, it would have deserved no more than a single star rating. However the sting in the tale makes you leave the cinema hall in a slightly better mood. The twist in the last 15 minutes is unexpected and does actually wake you up from the slumber induced by the rubbish screenplay and writing. I shall not spoil the fun by revealing any more details for those of you planning to catch this latest Salman flick.

But as a parting shot, I cannot resist sharing a quote from a friend who accompanied me for the show. After the lights went on he quipped, ‘The drama in the last 15 minutes is kick-started by Kareena’s fear that a single guy with a gun will actually go and kill Salman. This is right after she was an eye witness to an unarmed Salman finishing off an entire gang of baddies who were fully armed. Even fighting the last few ones with his eyes shut! Amazingly illogical!!’
Illogical it is. But then we had never entered the cinema hall expecting some logic, it was some hard core desi entertainment we desired; sadly we didn’t get that either.

RATING: 1.5/5