Terror In Our Midst

Villains make the hero look good. The worse his intent, the crueler his methods, the more heroic is the 'Yippie-Kai-Ye Motherfucker!' spouting cowboy, who with just as much violence, saves the world.

When Harrison Ford throws the bad guy off mid-air, saying vehemently, 'Get off my plane!' you find yourself raising your fist in the air and waving it with feeling. The joy of watching a bad guy who kills men and women on Air Force One without any compunction fall off an airplane sans parachute is only compounded by the surging pride when you know that the man of the hour is none other than the President himself. Which in turn makes the audience believe that their vote has not been wasted.

Escape From Entebbe may be a inspired by real life rescue of a hijacked flight, and you sort of guess the events. But when Arnie saves his daughter and the terrorist holding her for ransom flies off to a bizarre end riding on a missile in True Lies, we cheer as loudly as Jamie Lee Curtis.

In Bollywood movies too terrorists plant hugely complicated bombs in stadiums full of people (borrowed from Sudden Death), or operate on a lone misguided mission as in A Wednesday. The terrorists often drive one man to fulfilling their mission by holding his family at gunpoint. But many a time fail because they choose the wrong guy, as in Aamir.

In the hugely successful series Die Hard,Bruce Willis gave us the character of John McClane who will destroy every scary terrorist to save his family. But look at it from the point of view of the story teller. How else do you drill fear into the hearts of millions of filmgoers unless the terrorist is as cold-blooded as Alan Rickman? Unless Iron Man has a villain bad enough to use technology created by Starck Industries against him, then the rescue of Ms Pepper Potts and the rest of the civilised world won't seem to be as heroic, isn't it?Terror has home grown names like Kabul Express, New York and Kurbaan. We see the at the hero (Saif Ali Khan) who turns out to be a villain and ourheart races with his pretty wife (Kareena Kapoor) as she tries to save the world all by herself. No! We want to scream. You cannot do this alone! You have no clue what to do with burqua clad extremist aunties...

We have Irish Terrorists in Tom Clancy books converted to movies, and we have Russian generals gone bad in others. James Bond fought S.P.E.C.T.E.R through many movies, but not a week ago, the balance of power in the real world was shifted when Osama Bin Laden was reduced to EKIA.And it looks like we will have to find other villains. Meanwhile, we can terrorist kingpin lookalikes entertain us in Ali Zafar's Tere Bin Laden!

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