S
hootout At Lokhandwala’s tagline is a contradiction—"true rumours"—a clear indication of how facile a film it is. It shows no engagement with the politics of encounter killing, which is its core idea, but glorifies violence and machismo. Based on the real-life shootout of Dawood’s men by the Bombay police’s Anti-Terrorist Squad in 1991, the film doesn’t know what position to take on the contentious issue. It makes heroes out of underworld goons as well as trigger-happy cops, and makes both the stud parties walk glamorously in slo-mo towards the camera. In the process, the film itself becomes a mere display board for bodies, blood and bullets. It begins by calling the police "gangsters in uniform", humanises the goons as though they were merely misguided college dropouts, but in the end tilts towards the police, quoting silly statistics to justify encounter killings ("the crime rate dropped by 70 per cent in Bombay after the incident") rather than reading between the facts and figures.