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Wednesday 13 August 2014

Kick Kick Mein

I have never had the himmat (courage) to see either of the "Himmatwalla"s. The original or the remake. Wild horses couldn't drag me to the theatre to see the remake. Of course, the decision on the original was made by my parents, as I was a tiny little girl then, and of course they, like others born in their decade, had quite a taste for class, not crass.

So, while the first one had weird songs, things got weirder with part two. BPL or "Bum Pe Laat". A kick in the a....., which for the sake of those below 18 reading this post, we shall simply call "the rear". See, still that sounds cheesy 'cause it sounds very much like......errr......the real thing! Now that's a real class of a song! Even third class is, after all, a class!! Lyrics, music, choreography, the whole works. Even Tamanna Bhatia's "the rear", which was intended to have been the prize bull's eye for the "Laat" (kick).

Haah. So you thought this post was about "Himmatwalla"?! No..nnno..nno...no. No. After beating around several bushes, which may or may not have been as shapely as Tamanna's you-know-what, we come to the heart of this post which is about a movie called Kick. Kick? As in kick-in-the-.....err....."the rear"? Or the ones Messi and his team-mates sure got by the foot-fuls after they fooled with their foots? Sorry, feet. Or the ones that Laloo got when he tried to mess with the feet, sorry feed, of some very angry bovines?

No. Kick is not about that kind of, well, kick. Kick is about kick. Kick, as in what Salman bhai gets from driving dangerously on Mumbai roads and chasing endangered animals with loaded guns. Kick out of life. Kick out of doing really weird stuff, which were understood and appreciated only by his weirder parents (Mithun Chakravarty and Archana Puran Singh). And, of all, people, a psychiatrist (Jaqueline Fernandez, post some kind of cosmetic procedure) falls in love with him. Like a biologist would with a guinea pig. Or probably a physicist with a quark. Quite quarky, no, quirky, isn't it? Throw in a lean and mean kick-a** cop (Randeep Hooda), who has foreign cops and diplomats getting their orders from him. And Ek Villain called Shiv Gajra (Nawazuddin Siddiqui), who gets his kicks from making people kick-the-bucket even before their time for kicking the bucket has come. And also from making a kick, no, tick, no, "tock"-like sound from his mouth, after he's gotten his "kick".

That's all folks. That's all that's there in the movie. Else, the movie is like a kick, and a real and hard one at that, to one's frontal lobe, temporal lobe, parietal lobe, occipital lobe, cortex, even the well-embedded hard-to-get at hypothalamus, and may be even some still undiscovered parts of the human brain. A kick to one's senses and sensibilities. A kick to bucks too, though not the black variety, but the paper ones which reside within the interiors of our wallets. Even a raunchy item number, by a gyrating Nargis Fakhri, failed to give the audience their paisa-wasool (money's worth) kick. The seats in the theatre were probably itching to give our rears a kick, as I found it extremely difficult to sit for the entire length of the movie. Especially after my writer's brain got a penalty kick, when the climax turned out to be, well, not the climax. Chetan Bhagat?

After so many kicks, the audience is left black, blue and bruised. That is not being very human, Salman bhai.
When the credits rolled by, the psychiatrist heroine was also gyrating. If only the director and script-writers had made her talk to the traumatized audience, suffering from PTSD, to explain the kick they got in making Kick and getting us kicked! Probably some counselling would have done the kick, sorry, trick and soothed "the rear" after so many BPLs.

In retrospect, may be my parents weren't very pragmatic in their child "rear"-ing. Had they taken me for "Himmatwalla" in my childhood, I would have withstood the BPLs of Kick, with less trauma in my adulthood. I wonder if I, too, made the same mistake by not taking my kids to Kick. Probably they would have been better prepared for watching a 30-years-later remake of Kick, without getting their rears kicked.

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