Movie Mahal

Hum is outrageous, outlandish but also borderline brilliant in the hyper-stylised aesthetics of Mukul Anand who really knew how to frame a shot. Set on the docks of a crime infested Bombay ruled over by Danny’s ‘Bhaktawar’, the industrial-slum-proletariat milieu with overexposed lighting, audacious dolly shots and quasi-documentary inserts makes for a bravura genre spectacle. The precursor was the brashly mannerist idioms of Vinod Chopra’s Parinda but Anand stretches such stylisation to extremes with ridiculously imaginative results. I mean, don’t get me wrong, this is an unashamed star vehicle for Amitabh in what was one of the much later phases of his career, after his posthumous comeback to box office stardom. Yet Anand savours a liberated Amitabh who seems to have real fun with the role of Tiger, a sort of semi-retired activist who dresses with a scarf as an appendage to remind us of his chic rebelliousness. Even if there is a sense of uncanny deja-vu with the ways in which Anand compiles a sort of Amitabh greatest hits expressly his Angry Young Man films, the hyper-stylisation makes the familiar weirdly invigorating. The Jumma Chumma De De song may feel dated today but the musical sequence itself is a punchy one, and yet again, it is the milieu of the squalid docks and this time an underground open space that creates a riotous ambience of frivolity. However, this praise is sadly restricted to the first hour or so. The rest of the film is a spasm of dreadfulness that features a cringe inducing retread of the Bat-dance by Prince with Rajni and Govinda hamming it up on the dance floor while Amitabh sits pondering if the make-up artists applied enough Just for Men to his hairline.