Agneepath 2012: A fitting remake with Sporadic Sparkles.

Remakes, they are strange. People have sky-high expectations and nostalgia ruling their minds all the time, while they are busy judging the new flick against the old classic.
You can not copy the original. Neither can you miss the essence. Especially when the legendary original one itself has been inspired by a movie as raw and as brilliant as Scarface and features Amitabh Bachchan introducing himself as one Vijay Deenanath Chauhan.

What do you do? What can you do? The only way out is not to copy anyone. Neither Al Pacino, nor Amitabh Bacchan. Let Hrithik be Hrithik.
Exactly what the 2012 version of Agneepath does. And that’s why it somehow clicks.
           
The story is definitely not new. It’s somehow the timing in contemporary  hindi cinema that makes Agneepath a bit different from the tech freak dons and robots and eurotrip-zindagis and DK Boses and pervert Behls of 2011.
‘A schoolmaster’s son revenging his father’s murder amid the expanding drug empire in the Mumbai of the 1990s.’
Though the movie is full of stars, it all boils down to an angry and grave Vijay (Hrithik), a voldemort-Kurtzish demon drug king Kancha (Sanjay Dutt), and a heavyweight fox-eyed girl-trafficker Rauf Lala (Rishi Kapoor).
Piyush Mishra’s dialogues are on the heavier side. Sometimes, they overpower, sometimes they irritate. Kancha’s excessive recitation of the Bhagwad Gita confuses us. At times he looks and behaves like a dickhead, and at times, he seems filled with immense spiritual wisdom. Intentional or not, but it does add to the dark villainy, typically present in the movies of 80’s and 90’s, and generally absent 2000 onwards. The look builds on Brando’s colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse now, and the unpredictability grows on the excessive muscles of Dutt.

Overall setting looks very impressive. On rare occasions do you see a remake making the story frame more archaic and mystic than the original one.
Hrithik might not have surpassed Amitabh, but Sanjay Dutt definitely goes beyond Danny. And in style.
One good thing about this agneepath is that hrithik in no way has even tried to attempt Amitabh’s demeanor. Even when he says,
“ Vijay Deenanath Chauhan, Poora Naam. Baap ka Naam, Deenanath Chauhan, Gaon Mandwa. ”
All we can see is his intense dialogue delivery and emotions flexing in sync with his muscles. The movie also scores real high amid the unpredictability of the characters. The background score is alarmingly loud, but the overall effect that gets created with darkening clouds, people getting hanged from dried banyan trees, screeching drum beats and a monsterous devil Kancha reciting verses of Bhagwad Gita while conspiring to become the drug king of Mumbai is a bit overwhelming.
Reference to Harivansh Rai Bachchan’s ‘Agnipath’ poem is mesmerizing, and does send chills down the spine, especially when these lines are uttered in different frames:
यह महान दृश्य है,
चल रहा मनुष्य है
अश्रु स्वेद रक्त से
लथपथ, लथपथ, लथपथ.
अग्निपथ, अग्निपथ, अग्निपथ.
Alok K.
Jan 26th, 2012
P.S. Priyanka Chopra has been wasted. Om Puri’s character has been denied justice. The scene with Hrithik and Priyanka running on the beach with his 15 years old sister holding a bunch of balloons is just not digested. But more than anything else sucks that damned ‘Chikni Chameli’. She’s the worst addition Karan Malhotra could add to his tribute to the original. In the song, both the hero and the villain look equally embarrassed by the “butt-batting” of Katrina!