The first review I wrote for mouthshut was for the film Sarkar. After that I had taken a sabaticall from watching movies, mainly due to rains.
However, this weekend even with viral fever(which was on the decline) I braved an incessant rain to watch Viruddh. Main reason being that I heard good reviews about Big B and the movie and was anxious to see it. I was waiting to get a bit healthy so that I could go for it.
It baffles me, as to why good films like viruddh do not get a kick start at the box office while stupid films like MPKK turn out to be good earners.
Basic reason is that max percentage of today’s viewers(mostly youth) are not interested in sensible and realistic movies. And while saying this, I wan’t to make clear that this is not a review by an old man. I am young and I definitely liked the film.
Coming to Viruddh - Its an out and out Big B film. He gave one of his finest performances right from shot 1. I was happy that his acting talent was totally used in the movie, unlike the previous releases(B&B, Sarkar).
After Black, this is another outstanding performance by Big B.
As far as the film is concerned, pre interval portion is really well made and has best in place comic timing. Post interval, the movie looks like it misses a punch. But neverthless the whole experience of watching it it touching. Post interval its Big B who holds your attention with his acting.
When I went back and analyzed why post interval was not so gripping, I realized that I have been used to these run of the mill revenge themes and that was the reason. This movie is about an old man’s reaction and not revenge to his son’s killing. Most of us are like Vidyadhar Patwardhan because we hate the system when we suffer due to some injustice, but are helpless and powerless to fight against it. It happens sometimes in our day to day lives right from incidents of our cellphone thefts to anguish against the Government over various issues or inability to fight with a higher official even when we are sure that we are on the right side.
This movie shows the slow reaction paused with breaks of relaxation for the old couple - which is necessiated by their age. So you won’t get to see some Sunny Deol runnning bang bang till his revenge is satiated. Instead you get to see an old man who is pained at sometimes, resigned to fate at someother times, giving rest to his aging body in some other scenes and feeling badly that he has to do something all of a sudden. These kinds of mood swings happen in all our lives on a regular basis. We tend to forget some bad things, we tend to adjust to some mishaps, but again we are furious the next moment that we need to do something about them or rather at our inabilities in reacting in a timely and correct way to those events.
Also I guess that some audience was feeling dejected at the lack of role for Dutt.
It was not required that Dutt become handy for Big B in the post interval as most of us could have expected. Again this is a syndrome that got driven into our veins on account of endless movies which had such a storyline.
So in essence, post interval was realistic and if we ignored that reality, it might not look so gripping. My word is - if viewed realistically, post interval is as good as the pre-interval. This is what I realized in 24 hrs after watching the movie.
And it means that the movie continued to work on my mind even after watching it.
Which means its worth a watch!
However one bad thing was the advertising of different products - like Nerolac, Western Union etc that was happening through the movie. Clearly this trend should not continue. It would be devastating if ads made their way into movies in this manner. This kind of an implicit inclusion of advertisements in movies is a strict No No.