Everything in Anil Sharma’s long-awaited post-Gadar opus-focus goes on for too long. You can see, Sharma means business. The Hero: Love Story Of A Spy is an expertly executed slab of mainstream cinema. Sharma knows which buttons to push to get the required audience response. Exacerbated jingoism often substitutes for meaningful moments of interaction.
The basic meat is predictably, barbecued on Paki fires. After Gadar, Sharma knows how turned on the Indian audience gets with anti-Pakistan rhetorics. They flow out of the furiously paced actioner-romance with an urgency of an overloaded bus that must make it to its destination before dusk, and never mind the casualties it causes on the way.
One obvious casualty of screenplay and dialogue writer Shaktimaan’s zealous patriotism is good taste. The Pakistani terrorist wings are shown holding prayer beads, talking terror and making mayhem. The irony isn’t allowed to be lost on the audience, nor on an old Paki matriarch who scornfully spits out at her own bigoted brethren, “Just by growing a beard you don’t become a priest.”
To carry the analogy into cinema—just by making a success of the Paki-bashing formula in Gadar, director Anil Sharma can’t hope to do it again. He tries hard. Rajpal Yadav playing an Indian spy spits out at an ISI terrorist, “The one who errs once is an insaan, the one who errs twice is a shaitaan and the one who errs repeatedly is Pakistan.”
Clap clap. Whistle whistle. But what beyond the rituals of pinning down the enemy-without, swatting it repeatedly as it squirms in pained embarrassment? The Hero reduces Kashmiri militancy to a game of chess. The pristine-white pieces include chorus girls in Canada who jiggle their posteriors into the camera for posterity’s sake. Our hero must pretend to enjoy all the female attention for the sake of his country.
Oh, the things we must do on the job! Sharma’s film doesn’t have much to give us beyond the name- calling and nitpicking against the enemies across the border. This isn’t the first film to lash out at the ISI for perpetrating terrorism in the valley. John Mathan’s Sarfarosh did it with more cautious conviction four years ago.
Anil Sharma goes berserk with a blizzard of fantasy-patriotism. The Hero isn’t a bad film. But it lacks real feelings. Everything in the narrative is about creating an effect. Helicopters hover over snowcapped mountains, lavish tombs and domes get blown up and nuclear plants are run into ruin by our super-hero Major Arun Khanna(Sunny Deol).
When the Major arrives in the Kashmir Valley local girls form a giggly gauntlet to welcome him. One has to be truly special to be accorded such an extraordinary welcoming committee at a time when the Valley is under crippling stress. Major Khanna is soon feeding mithai to the local ISI representatives and taking time off for romancing Reshma (Preity Zinta).
To avoid any communal aspersions (audiences are ostensibly allergic to Hindu-Muslim romances) we’re hurriedly told that Reshma is a Hindu girl adopted by a Muslim couple in her childhood. Having got its political correctness straight it’s time for the narration to play eye-spy with Reshma serving as Indian moll in an armyman’s house in Pakistan.
Though facile, this is the most absorbing part of the narration. And Reshma’s bid to escape her enemies with the help of a goodhearted local (Asif Zakaria) when she’s caught out, is heart-in-the-mouth stuff.
But then out comes the heart and in goes the foot in the mouth. The second-half of the film gets caught up in a whirlpool of whirring hijinks and overbaked rhetorics. The Sunny Deol-Preity Zinta-Priyanka Chopra love triangle (love quadrangle, if you count Pravin Dabas as a saintly Pakistani dude mooning over Preity) that’s teased into the commodious plot in the second-half seems like a bit of a digression in a narration that’s rapidly running out of steam.
By the time the climax chugs along (literally, since like Gadar, the climax is on board a hurling train) the bad guys from Pakistan led by the evil Isaq Khan (Amrish Puri) are all foaming at their mouths in rapid-fire motions of chaos and commotion.
There are moments that one cherishes beyond the stylish sound and flamboyant fury of a film that wants to win over an audience at any cost. The Deol-Zinta romance in the first- half unconsciously echoes the Dharmendra-Sharmila Tagore relationship in Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Satyakam.
In his quieter moments Sunny Deol reminds you of his father from that cool-in-its-times espionage thriller Aankhen. But the various disguises just don’t work on Sunny Deol. Watching him do a bit of Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible, Val Kilmer in The Saint and his papa Dharmendra in Satyakam is a far more interesting than the more obvious personality assumptions that Deol is made to undergo for the sake of country.
For a macho movie, Preity Zinta has a fairly substantial role. She’s played a Kashmiri girl in terrorism –ridden Kashnmir before (in Mission Kashmir). Though she carries off the innocent derringdo act, her body language and giggle-and-grin expressions are no different from Dil Chahta Hai or Dil Hai Tumhara. Zinta needs to seriously shop for new expressions. Unlike Sunny she can’t even fall back on lineage. Amrish Puri should win an award for the most hammy performance of his career. Just why an actor of his stature is reduced to shrieking in droll dementia is a question that only the director can answer.
Priyanka Chopra’s debut is a bit of a non-happening. Though she looks svelte and pretty, and is bound to places in the near future her role in the Major’s minor triangle is laughably meagre.
If the film scores high marks in any area, it‘s the technical finesse. The two high points of the production design are Suresh Urs’ editing and Kabir Lal’s cinematography which create a heightened impact in the drama without forfeiting the naturalistic tones of the headline-based plot. But for a predominantly action film, Allan Amin’s action is shockingly wishy-washy. Not once do we see Deol do anything that makes our adrenaline race. The much touted aerial stunts bring us down to earth with a thud.
Gadar worked so well because it told a story we believed in. Sharma has cleverly incorporated elements from that film in The Hero. If in Gadar Sunny Deol hunted for Amisha Patel here he spends half the film looking for Preity Zinta. When the search is over we rejoice. But not for the reunited lovers. Only for the end of our ordeal
In an interview I conducted with Priyanka Chopra after the release of The Hero, she was very excited about the way her inceptive career was going. “I never thought my two performances in my debut films The Hero and Andaaz would make such an impact. These were two-heroine films, and I had the less footage. In The Hero Preity Zinta and in Andaaz Lara Dutta had the author-backed roles. Still, if people thought I had a screen presence I must have done something right. I don’t want to sign films for the heat only. I find it neither flattering nor amusing when I ‘m called hot. Anyone who has a good body and takes off clothes is hot. I want to be more than that. Of course I like it when people say I’m sexy. But I want to be known as someone who can deliver performances. I’m 20 and more confident and capable of handling dramatic scenes. I’m now doing Abbas-Mustan’s Aitraaz. And boy, am I hot in the film! Aitraaz is a romantic thriller. I provide the shock value. Kareena Kapoor is the film’s other leading lady. But please, she isn’t the conventional heroine while I’m the unconventional one. Nothing as simple as that. When I did The Hero with Preity Zinta she was quite cool to work with. With Lara Dutta there was obviously this issue about who among the two beauty queens would perform better. But it was a healthy competition. We even shopped together for our clothes.”
