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A stopover flick
Aan (Hindi)
Aan is a "coming of age" venture for Madhur Bhandarkar, who fired from the fringes with Chandni Bar, tried in vain with Satta and now tries his hand at regular mainstream cinema, replete with a brainless plot, bullets, blood and bawdy songs, substituting guile for grunt.
From the bleak, grey, women-oriented world of Chandni Bar and Satta, he marries kitsch. Aan is short neither on outrageously loud dialogues, uni-dimensional characters, nor on banalities. Hence, we have the unique spectacle of Akshay Kumar's DCP leading the charge against all the bad men. And there are plenty— Jackie Shroff finding a new occupation in the sunset years, Raveena Tandon, staying on borrowed time, Irrfan, trying gamely to continue the good work of Haasil and Maqbool, and Manoj Joshi, doing what comes naturally to him.
Of course, Akshay gets some support from the ageing Suniel Shetty, playing an inspector and the much-aged Shatrughan Sinha. The best part of the film is provided by Paresh Rawal as a comic, fumbling, blundering Inspector Khalid. He dies at the interval, leaving behind a funeral procession.
If Bhandarkar wanted his audience to have a date with symbolism, he could not have chosen a more poignant one.
Bhandarkar manages to protect a fig leaf of dignity if you like some good stunts, some slick pace, and do not mind yet another helping of a plot of hard working cops, evil politicians and underworld.
One almost forgets the three girls in this action thriller — Raveena, Lara and Preeti. Bhandarkar almost forgot them too. They come to flash their well-curled eyelashes, pout and disappear.
As for the good cops, they might just turn the corner with Nihalani's film!
By Ziya us Salam
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Life
Bangalore
Chennai
Coimbatore
Delhi
Hyderabad
Kochi
Madurai
Thiruvananthapuram
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