I can never cease to get amazed by director duo Abbas and Mustan Burmawala. They dress in pristine white and look like the harmless unclejis next door. But when it comes to movies, they specialise in cobbling together the darkest of plots from foreign DVDs and spicing them up with enough song-’n-dance numbers and bawdy humour to appeal to the Indian palate. In Race things get darker, murkier and more debauched—quite deliberately and desperately so. What’s even more surprising is the relish with which the audience was lapping up the moral ambiguities, at least in the first day first show I watched at Delhi’s old Delite cinema. Call it inverted snobbery or sharing a vibe with the audience, but I quite enjoyed the experience. Unlike the duo’s previous outings, 36 China Town and Naqaab, that made me want to walk out, here I was pretty much around till the end.
Race is schlock cinema at its best or worst whichever way you choose to describe it and it doesn’t pretend to be anything more. It’s pure junk so stay away if you’re into healthy, wholesome entertainers. The film is about treachery and deceit, it’s about two brothers fighting over women and insurance money, and has one twist after another turn, so much so that you feel like telling the filmmakers to save some for their forthcoming ventures. It’s another in the genre of the Dhoom kind of masala movies gaining ground in Bollywood, for bad or for worse. There’s no sense of time and space, no depth to the characters. Even actors of the caliber of Saif and Akshaye forget to perform, one sleepwalks and the other hams his way through. The less said about others the better. Race is also not about well-constructed plot and plausible situations. It’s just a smart, racy narrative with only one purpose—to titillate and please voyeuristic eyes of the audience. So there are good-looking bodies in ubercool glares and nifty dresses walking slo-mo, low-angle shots of women grooving in minis with miles of bronzed, toned legs, sexy cars, eye-popping stunts and glam locales. Race may well be the flavour of the season like raunchy comedies the last couple of years. But how long will this genre sustain its appeal?
High Fives
Bollywood
1. Race
2. Jodhaa Akbar
3. Black & White
4. Taare Zameen Par
5. Welcome
Hollywood
1. Horton Hears a Who!
2. Meet the Browns
3. Shutter
4. Drillbit Taylor
5. 10,000 B.C.
Rock
1. Long Road to Ruin (Foo Fighters)
2. Psycho (Puddle of Mudd)
3. Shadow of the Day (Linkin Park)
4. Fake it (Seether)
5. Crushcrushcrush (Paramore)
Courtesy: Film Information
