My rating: 4.5 out of 5
The Quentin curse: many movies and their directors aspire to match Quentin Tarantino - most (including QT himself - see Death Proof) don't succeed. Kaminey proves it can be done...with all the trappings of a good Bollywood movie to boot. This has to be the best Bollywood movie of the year - maybe in the last couple of years, or even longer.
The story is complex, but plays to the most basic of emotions - greed. Shahid Kapoor plays twins who can't stand each other and who both have speech impediments - Good Twin (GT, for short) stammers, Bad Twin (BT, of course) has a weird lisp (says "f" for "s" - watch him talk about his "fell phone" in one particularly good scene). GT works for an NGO. BT is constantly on the lookout for a get-rich quick scheme to, well, get rich quickly (because he knows that "life is a b**ch") and set himself up as a bookie. The movie begins with BT and GT having one of those days when nothing goes right - BT loses money on a fixed race at the tracks and GT finds out his girl-friend (Priyanka Chopra) is pregnant. There are at least 3 gangs - a Bengali gang of 3 brothers that fixes races and deals in guns and ammo, a Mumbai is for Marathis gang-leader with political aspirations and a fearsome drug dealer with an African wife whose brother (the wife's brother, complete with an African dialect and African English) is setting up a drugs for diamonds deal. And, let's not forget the guys who fixed the fixed race (right at the beginning of the movie, remember?). BT, while out to break a leg (quite literally) comes to possess a guitar case full of cocaine - and in come corrupt cops, armed henchmen of various shapes and sizes, very rainy streets, blood-spattering violence and some real trash talk, and you have a wonderful, exhilarating ride of a movie.
Kaminey is remarkable on many fronts, but mostly in the high expectations it has from the audience - in a strange way it expects you to enjoy movies enough for you to work hard at understanding Kaminey to enjoy it. For instance, the characters speak a mix a mix of Hindi, Mumbai hindi, Marathi, Bengali and an African dialect - no default subtitles anywhere (I had the benefit of subtitles while watching it in the US) - you are just expected to make sense of everything. Vishal extracts humor in practically every situation - in one particularly interesting sequence, the cops give GT a good work-over, and then almost gently ask him to sing out the information he has to offer to overcome the stammer - they are working on a tight deadline, you see, and this stammering slows things down to an unacceptable degree. Or, where GT questions his girlfriend about her Home Science credentials when it turns out she got pregnant - one of those scenes you really need to see to get the humor... Vishal's background score is excellent, and the songs actually accelerate rather than interrupt the pace.
See Kaminey to know how good movies can be fun to watch (and apparently fun to make and act in). And Quentin bhai, here is a worthy entry to the long list of contenders...
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