Review of Johnny Gaddaar (2007) by Samir S — 29 Mar 2008

Bollywood's best movie of 2007.

There is something to be said for low expectations, and Johnny Gaddar benefits a great deal from those. One of those typical heist-gone-wrong capers that is actually very atypical in Bollywood, Gaddar comes with low pre-release hype (unusual for nowadays) and pays homage to James Hadley Chase and 70's Bollywood "thrillers", but is actually far superior to both.

Five people, who refer to themselves as a gang, plan a routine get-rich-quick bag drop until one of them (our "hero", debutant Niel Nitin Mukesh in a finely nuanced performance) decides to betray his friends and pocket all the money himself. So far so predictable. But the movie actually catches fire in the moments he has to decide how far does he go in hiding his role - for example, is he willing to kill the other gang-members, even the ones he genuinely likes ?

With near flawless plotting and chracterisation, this is ultimately director Sriram Raghavan's triumph who is helped by some truly superb supporting performances (Zakir Hussain and the always reliable Vinay Pathak) and a fine score by Shankar-Ehsan-Loy - particularly the thumping Move your body, Mukesh's impromptu dance to which is our first hint that he might not be the innocent, obedient rookie he paints himself to be.

From then on, there is no let-up in either the pace or the twists, and most unusually for a Bollywood film, no plot holes (in fact if you have ever seen a better Bollywood thriller, do let me know). In the tradition of the best noir films, Gaddar is as much about the fickle nature of human morality as it is about the pursuit of tainted money, and one wonders how the film might have turned out had Raghavan stuck to his original instinct of shooting in black and white.

In many ways, this is the classic anti-Hitchcock film - rather than the innocent man accused of a crime whom nobody believes, this is the guilty man whom everybody thinks just couldn't have done it. Raghavan's signal achievement is to keep our sympathies equally divided between all the main characters right till the end, and the gang-members' comeuppance, while having an air of inevitability about it, is always achieved with surprise and panache.

My favourite moment: Govind Namdeo's quietly sadistic cop is stroking a cat when he surprises Mukesh and his lover (actually Hussain's wife with whom the hero is having an affair), and says in his most matter-of-fact Marathi accent "Nice pussy". A delightfully menacing, tasteless moment from a delightfully menacing, sophisticated film !