Viruddh

Director: Mahesh Manjrekar

Cast: Amitabh Bachchan, Sharmila Tagore, John Abraham, Anusha Dandekar, Sachin Khedekar, Prem Chopra, Sharat Saxena, Shivaji Sattam, Amitabh Dayal, Sunjay Dutt

7.5/10

The old warhorse is what he came to be known as, after Kaun Banega Crorepati made him the Big B. Before Zanjeer unchained him from the 12 flops he had in the beginning of his career, he was politely called a ghoda, till Iftikhar, as Davar Seth in Deewaar, called him a lambi race ka ghoda.

In his new ageing avataar, with movies being written for him, he became the venerable Mr Bachchan. After Black, we thought he’s reached the limits of his histrionic talent, he can’t get better than this. Then came Sarkar and we wondered where in the distance the horizon of his histrionics really lay. And then you get Viruddh.

Is there anything still left in this man that is untapped? You can rub your eyes in disbelief, but sometimes through Viruddh, you get the uncomfortable feeling that he’s better than even in Black. On the strength of the second half alone, he’s up for a National Award. (That alone gets the film two points extra in the rating.) It’s the overall film that can’t stand on its own wobbly feet. Which means that Amitabh is the race horse attached to a bullock-cart here.

Mahesh Manjrekar’s Viruddh is a rehash of Saaransh all right by the other Mahesh (Bhatt), even if it is “set in the networked and global milieu” in 2005 and tells a tale that has “classical elements and structure and can be relocated in almost any context”. Not to speak of the blatant and overused in-film advertising which often makes it look like in-advertisement filmmaking. The courtroom sequence at the end is so illogical that you wonder if the judge (and the director of the film) is David Dhawan. Or, take the taali-bajao scene in which the good bad boy, Sunjay Dutt, beats up the poor lawyer in the house of the old couple. No matter how clever the adaptation is, such loopholes in the screenplay add up to make them look larger than they actually are.

Whether it is the story of a good young boy studying abroad and losing his life in an act of do-gooding, or the extraordinary courage under extreme pressure that an aged couple can summon up, Viruddh, in the end, is the story of a race horse and the bullock-cart. Everything else, including the rest of the cast, is a poor 10th, 11th, 12th...

Anil Grover