23.12 cr
connections
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remake of
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Agneepath
a.k.a. : Agnipath
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release date
January 26, 2012 (India)
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language
Hindi
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genre
Action, Drama
FilmOrbit reviews
It could be a Norman Rockwell picture, of a boy and his dad, walking on the edge of a calm sea, sharing poetry that gives them strength to live an upright life. Then suddenly you realise that it is more Sin City than then the ideal pastoral life.
The …
It could be a Norman Rockwell picture, of a boy and his dad, walking on the edge of a calm sea, sharing poetry that gives them strength to live an upright life. Then suddenly you realise that it is more Sin City than then the ideal pastoral life.
The bald headed stranger who comes into their life brings chaos and death in their lives. Violence is so palpable in this movie that it should have been offered a special place in the credits. You hear every bone crack and feel the stones reach out and extract every drop of blood as if it was owed to them. And the magical land of Mandwa that taught the young boy poetry and the meaning of life (His dad tells him, 'It's not about strength and power. It's about what you do with the power.') becomes the land of horrors and the young boy grows up and lives for just one thing: to reclaim Mandwa as his own.
It's just that the grown up Vijay Deenanath Chauhan is as teary as the young man was intense. I love revenge movies. It gives us, the audience something to look forward to. When Gabbar is being trampled by those ghastly shoes, we become a part of that violence, cheering for Thakur.We feel the same here, but the director makes us wait eternally for the moment where we forget his barging on to an island without much planning (I hate seeing heroes bashed up even though I am a willing participant in the process where he hauls himself up and hits the bad guy).
Speaking of wait, this movie is almost three hours long (2 hours 58 minutes), and at one point you do not wish to be distracted by anything (the Mission Impossible 4 phone booth blowing up; the Malik like character for Om Puri; the Kaminey like wedding scene) and you wish the hero would get on with his revenge thing faster.
I have huge respect for silences in the movies. Sometimes the quiet aggression of characters like Michael Corleone (Godfather) is preferable to the Dharmendra type Kutte! Main Tumhara Khoon Pi Jaaoongaa' type announcements of revenge. But then, this is a Bollywood masala flick. And silence has no space in any frame. There is either the background score, or endless dialog. There is no brooding, no silences,no stealth. Everything is loud and in your face.
Rishi Kapoor is a great study of a gangster. His deviousness is very maqbool. His emoting, very believable. So are the hoards of other minor characters who make up this palette of this world of crime. Pity they chose to pay homage to Parinda in the middle of the movie. It is very distracting and annoying.
The director has a great sense of color though (the scenes with Gulal are used brilliantly) and knows the most effective angles when shooting the violent scenes (and the film is brutal). The father-son, sister brother scenes bring a lump in your throat, and although Hrithik is too good looking to be considered small town lad with hatred on his mind, he is great when stops crying.
Sanjay Dutt plays one of the scariest villains I have come across in films, and you have to be determined to not let him get into your head. Never thought I would ever put him up there with Steve Buscemi, but there you are. he is ugly, and scary and you wouldn't trust him with your little finger, let alone your sons and daughters.
I must reiterate that I preferred the determined, intense resolve of the young Vijay much more to the teary emoting of the buff, banian-wearing grown up Vijay. But, full marks to the director and Hrithik for creating a brand new memory with the famous dialog, "Vijay Deenanath Chauhan, baap ka naam...' You know the rest.
Go see it, simply because it's truly Bollywood (action, emotion, drama, romance!), and also because it is not some mindless comedy like the ones we have been relegated to watching in the last couple of years.
videos
film cast
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Hrithik Roshan
as Vijay Dina Nath Chavhan
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Rishi Kapoor
as Rauf Lala
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Priyanka Chopra
as Kaali
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Sanjay Dutt
as Kancha
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Katrina Kaif
as Chikni Chameli
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Rajesh Tandon
as Mazhar lala
film crew
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Karan Malhotra
Director
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Karan Johar
Producer
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Ajay Gogavale
Music Director
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Atul Gogavale
Music Director
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Amitabh Bhattacharya
Lyricist
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Roop Kumar Rathod
Playback Singer
photos
music
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Chikni Chameli …
Lyrics: Amitabh Bhattacharya
Singer: Shreya Ghoshal
Music Director: Atul Gogavale, Ajay Gogavale
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O Saiyyan …
Lyrics: Amitabh Bhattacharya
Singer: Roop Kumar Rathod
Music Director: Atul Gogavale, Ajay Gogavale
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Gun Gun Guna …
Lyrics: Amitabh Bhattacharya
Singer: Sunidhi Chauhan, Udit Narayan
Music Director: Atul Gogavale, Ajay Gogavale
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Shah Ka Rutba …
Lyrics: Amitabh Bhattacharya
Singer: Anand Raj Anand, Sukhwinder Singh, Krishna
Music Director: Atul Gogavale, Ajay Gogavale
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Abhi Mujh Mein Kahin …
Lyrics: Amitabh Bhattacharya
Singer: Sonu Nigam
Music Director: Atul Gogavale, Ajay Gogavale
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Deva Shree Ganesha …
Lyrics: Amitabh Bhattacharya
Singer: Ajay Gogavale
Music Director: Atul Gogavale, Ajay Gogavale
plot
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In a small Indian village Mandwa, Vijay Dinanath Chauhan (Hrithik Roshan) is taught by his principled father about the path of fire - Agneepath. His life is completely shattered when the evil drug dealer Kancha (Sanjay Dutt) hangs his father to death. Vijay leaves for Bombay with his pregnant mother and has only one mission in life- to come back to Mandwa and bring back the glory of his father’s name. In Bombay, 12-yr-old Vijay is taken under the wings of the city gang lord Rauf Lala (Rishi Kapoor). From then on it is a journey of revenge where he makes and breaks many relationships only to get closer to his aim. Vijay finds support only in his best friend Kaali (Priyanka Chopra), who stands by him at every moment in his life. Fifteen years later his hatred for Kancha takes him back to Mandwa where life comes full circle.
critic reviews
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Taran Adarsh
for Bollywood Hungama
AGNEEPATH is an uncomplicated story of revenge, is hard-hitting yet entertaining, dwells on strong emotions and aggressive and for…
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Komal Nahta
for Koi Moi
What’s Good: The arresting screenplay; the performances of the cast; the Chikni Chameli song; the raw action; the canvas, the ma…
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Mayank Shekhar
for Hindustan Times
The line, \"Kya lekar aaye the, aur kya lekar jaoge,\" referring to the perishable human body that\'s merely a cloth or uniform fo…
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Piyali Dasgupta
for Ndtv Movies
The movie begins in the strategically located hamlet of Mandwa and then moves to Mumbai. Hrithik Roshan as Vijay Dinanath Chauhan …
user reviews
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Krishnakumar Sankaran
I caught a late night show of Agneepath last night. However, after a long night’s sleep, I seem to …
I caught a late night show of Agneepath last night. However, after a long night’s sleep, I seem to have forgotten most of it. So it seems I’ll have to rely on my hastily jotted notes on my phone while watching the movie. So here goes.
You don’t walk into Agneepath blind. You know the skeleton of the plot: the village of Mandwa, the idealistic schoolmaster father, the proud young son, the betrayal that leads to the father’s death, exile for the son and the mother, the eternal thirst for vengeance that later consumes the son’s life. We know how it begins, we know how it ends. Even knowing this, this reworked Agneepath manages to astound, to
The hero
The comparison between the new and old avatars of Vijay Chauhan are inevitable. But they are two completely different characters. The modern version (ably essayed by Hrithik Roshan) is the same driven man as the older version, one who cannot bring himself to escape the trauma of his father’s death. But, right from the start, we see that he is no recluse. His thirst for vengeance has not embittered him. Yes, we do see him as a hardened ruthless criminal mastermind who is secretly working on his plan for revenge. But, at the same time, we see him sing/dance at a party the good folk at Dongri have thrown on the occasion of his sister’s birthday. We see him brooding over the thought of marriage. We see him weep openly over his mother’s continued shunning of him. And we see the shadow of remorse over him when he must betray an acquaintance in his quest for Mandwa. Since this is a story of revenge, he must and he does choose to forgo everything for its sake. But the choice isn’t easy for this Vijay Chauhan.
The villain
Sanjay Dutt’s Kancha is perhaps one of the most disturbing villains I have seen on Bollywood. He dresses like a baba, smokes up from a clay chillum, and is prone to spouting lines from the Gita. He is, I thought, the ideal fascist. Eccentric, power-hungry, driven not so much by the everyday pressures of making a buck and holding on to it (as most criminal bosses are) but by an inner need to be in control of everything around him. We see that he is incapable of working with others. He runs the village of Mandwa with a gang of thugs he runs on booze, drugs and cheap thrills. His tyranny over Mandwa does not rely only on guns. In the beginning, it is Kancha who hangs the schoolmaster (who is opposed to Kancha’s plans for the village) from a tree on an overhanging cliff, before an approving mob of villagers. We see Kancha repeating this originary act of (sort of) revolutionary terror later in front of his villagers, hanging people in the same manner from the same tree. By repeating the same formal act of violence, he frames his control over the villagers by reasserting the old dialectic that brought him to power. Sanjay Dutt’s Kancha is less of a gangster and more of a tyrant.
Other miscellanies:
- Rauf Lala, an aging Mumbai don, is brilliantly played by Rishi Kapoor. Where both Vijay Chauhan and Kancha are both almost superheroic in their deeds, their desires and their aspirations, Rauf Lala is refreshing as a scheming, devious don out to conserve his seat of power and his area of operations. In a movie that fetishizes individual action so much over the acts of the collective (Vijay singlehandedly taking on Mandwa, Kancha absurdly hanging people holding the rope in one arm, etc.), Lala abides and thrives within a system.
- The colours in the movie are exquisite, especially during the festival scenes (the dahi-handi and the Ganesh Visarjan). Though Mandwa itself looks a drab, faceless grey.
- The mother and the sister spend their lives apart from Vijay, in a little suburban middle-class shell of their own. I wonder if the part where the raw violence of Vijay’s life breaks into their own, could have been highlighted better.
Overall, I liked the movie and will watch it again some day, just to see if there is more to it. -
Nilesh Keshatwar
It is in the end, an old-fashioned revenge drama treated in that melodramatic, over-the-top style. Y …
It is in the end, an old-fashioned revenge drama treated in that melodramatic, over-the-top style. You're not likely to be bored by the intense action and the solid performances, but prepare to be exhausted by just how long this film plays on.
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J.A
I can understand why Karan doesnt want to direct this movie. Too much angst and darkness for it to b …
I can understand why Karan doesnt want to direct this movie. Too much angst and darkness for it to be a Karan Johar directed movie. For those who have watched the Agneepath starring Amitabhji and Dannyji, try not to compare so much the level of deliverance on both movies. Yes the plot has been implanted in the 2012 movie, but the way the movie and characters are have a life of their own. Sanju baba plays the bad guy so so well in this film that i feel that there can be no one else to can play his given role as evil as he can. Rishi Kapoor, another villain in the movie and the way he portrays the role, made me forget all the other fatherly roles he played which equates to, yup he was damn good. Hrithik delivered a different Vijay. I actually preferred the original Vijay because he had more angst and raw violence in his personality. Hirthik's character had more pain and you can understand his violent nature because of the pain. 1 thing you cannot miss will be the item song choreographed by Ganesh was mind blowing. How he made Katrina dance, made her other dances look like child's play. The dance will literally thrust you in your face. Overall, the movie is definitely worth the movie ticket plus popcorns and a few whistles along the way
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filmOrbit lists
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Top 5 Weekly Bollywood Grossers
Top Bollywood Week ended: February 09, 2012
