Review of Raajneeti (2010) by Cyriac Abby P — 05 Jun 2010

In director Prakash Jha's India, the country is ruled by one big political party, which is actually one big political family with bigger men, bigger bodyguards, bigger guns and bigger cars. Father, Sons, Uncles, Daughter, Family Friends, Drivers, Driver's Sons, Driver's Son's friends, Friend's Friends, all want to dip their fingers in the political power apple pie and taste the sweetness of influence. So starts the big back stabbing, front stabbing, side stabbing, over the head stabbing and lots of shooting and bombing and explosions among everyone in the family and around it for power, in the name of politics. It's a big bad ass political soup for starters.

Ok,this movie is pretty long. A 3 hour marathon, even with highly edited sequences and incomplete songs (thank God for that). Secondly, its good. Good in the sense, it wont bore you. You will be stuck onto the characters and the plots, which are well made and well acted out and there is no nonsense in the story line ( except of course, towards the end, there is a typical Bollywood-ish climax, which of course, is expected, since this is a Bollywood movie :-/).

This movie has nothing to do with Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi or even Mahatma Gandhi. It has fresh characters, fresh ideas and a good screenplay to meddle with.

Ranbir Kapoor is a natural, watch out for him. He is fineness in acting defined. But for me, the two people who made it to the top of power house performances were Manoj Bajpai, as the Cain incarnate and Arjun Rampal as the brutal hero. Beautiful performances, worth mentioning.

Katrina Kaif speaks Hindi. She does it well. She waves like Sonia Gandhi and she doesnt have that blank bimbo look on her face anymore and she doesnt show skin or pucker her lips. She has grown and she is pretty good in the character.

Soundtracks are copied from epic English movies. But then it has to be, we have Bappi Lahiri and Himesh Rashmiya, so we have no options left, but to listen to others good songs.

I like the way characters get picked off the screen in a massive last hour movie ending. It's violent and it's bloody fun!

It's worth a watch, if you can spare 3 hours of your valuable time to watch Mahabharata unwind in a different fashion in front of your eyes.