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Badlapur

Badlapur
The axe forgets…. But the tree remembers…..
This beautiful quote kickstarts this movie, which says in its title – Don’t miss the beginning… And boy am I glad that I didn’t….
And before I go any further I must say that I liked the movie though I didn’t love it. It has several flaws, which I could overlook given that it involves some of my favourite people- Sriram Raghavan, Varun Dhawan, Huma Quereshi, Radhika Apte, Vinay Pathak, Divya Dutta and last but not the least Nawazzuddin…..

Shouldn’t we just go ahead and declare Nawazzuddin a national treasure or something? He surely deserves it. What talent! Be it humor- black or otherwise or villainy he sure gets it all right! Can he at least be made to act non-stop so that he makes a gazillion movies for us to watch his spellbinding talent?

So this is a revenge saga and it is what Sriram does best… Remember Ek Hasina Thi, Johnny Gaddar? Well this one belongs to that similar genre but does not have the same class. Varun loses his wife and kid in a bank heist and then makes it his life’s mission to find the guy who did it. He is blocked in his quest by the crafty Nawaz who refuses to reveal his partner’s name. The beginning is really powerful and is shot handycam style, which makes it more chilling. Yami is the wife who is killed along with her son. Then comes Varun who is compelling in his performance exuding grief and causing moist eyes. Somehow here the reaction from the grandparents is rather silly. It was so incongruous that I actually squirmed. What went wrong here I wonder? Varun refuses to let go and confronts Nawaz about his partner, but has no success, so he hires Ashwini Kalsekar a detective to try and track him down. This leads him to Huma, a fire cracker of talent! And he abuses her to get back at Nawaz. So with Nawaz not giving away any secrets, all Dhawan can do is to settle down and await his release 20 yrs later. Here the prison life that Nawaz leads and his attempts to escape are brilliant touches and bring the much needed humor. I sure needed a laugh then as the brutal murder and the plight of Dhawan were truly making me melancholy.

Here the appearance of Divya Dutta as a social worker tells us what both Nawaz and Varun have been doing these past 15 yrs…. Now the story picks up pace again and we finally know who the partner is and Varun takes no time at all in making short work of the hapless two.

So the good things… Sriram is good in this one but not as brilliant as before… Varun shows good potential and its not his fault that he cant play a 40 something guy at this stage. But I know that he is on the highway to glory. All the other characters are competent. Huma and Nawaz are fab! And I was so glad that Aishwarya Rai turned down Huma’s role, she would have been a mockery. The snippets of Yami and Varun's married life are well scripted and woven in neatly into the narrative.

The bad stuff… the movie could have been faster…  Everything fell into place just too neatly for Varun, it was too trite!
But all in all would I watch it again? Hell! Yeah! After all today has been a Dhawan kinda day!


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