Let me say right at the outset that I am a huge fan of Vishal Bhardwaj. To me, he is easily the most complete director in Hindi cinema at the moment. And what he's done with Kaminey hasn't changed that, for I can't think of another director who could come close to him even in failure — except perhaps Anurag Kashyap.
With Kaminey, for once, I was fully prepared to believe all the hype, and every word of all the rave (at times fawning) reviews. And then I went to see the film, ready to be blown away, as the reviewers said I would be. But it didn't happen.
Well, it was entertaining. It was 'fun', as people like to say. But so was Love Aajkal. C'mon, I don't want just 'fun' from a Vishal Bhardwaj film? If I want only 'fun', I would go watch a Priyadarshan or an Imtiaz Ali or a Karan Johar or a David Dhawan flick, not Vishal Bhardwaj. To be sure, Maqbool was fun, too, but it wasn't ONLY fun. Omkara was fun too, but it was also a film that rammed you in the solar plexus. Kaminey, though, is merely fun.
Okay, the Dhan te nan is great. Charlie's lisp is fuperbly funny, and I am sure it's going to catch on in offices and campuses as a cool speech defect. The fast-paced editing, the stylized camera-work, the ultra-hip dialogue — it's all very well, Tarantino be damned. BUT, the script (so highly and misleadingly praised by critics) lacked that one element which has always marked out Bhardwaj as a superior director — character development.
Those of you who loved Maqbool and Omkara will immediately know what I mean. In Omkara, for example, what lends the script its rock-hard solidity is the character arc of Langda Tyagi, played to perfection by Saif Ali Khan. Combining meticulous characterisatiom with authentic setting and dialogues, Bhardwaj managed to produce cinematic gunpowder that simply blew the audience away.
Like in Omkara, in Kaminey too, you've got an interesting array of grey characters — twins who hate each other, a Marathi politician-don, a Tibetan drug-lord, and a feisty love interest. It's a promising enough mix. Now that all the ingredients have been brought together to ensure a gripping plot, what do we do? It is here that things begin to go wrong.
First of all, for this film to work in its entirety (as opposed to cool scene by cool scene), it is essential to establish why the twins are estranged in the first place. Bhardwaj knew that. But unlike in Maqbool, where you are seamlessly drawn into Abbaji's past, and unlike Omkara, where the back-story of Omi's (Ajay Devgan) romance with Dolly (Kareena Kapoor) is masterfully woven in, the back-story here is a total mess. The twins' father, whose role is critical to give substance to the divergent personalities of Guddu and Charlie, is less a father and more a plot device. Secondly, the climax is a disaster. Bhardwaj has expended valuable screen time building up characters like 'Tashi the Great' and the crazy Bong brothers — and you see nothing of their individuality or agency in the climax where they supposedly play an important role (this is another area in which the movie falls way short of Reservoir Dogs — a film Kaminey has been compared to — where the explosive climax works precisely because it derives from subtle characterization). Instead, everyone except Guddu, Charlie and Sweety gets killed in a meaningless, unchoreographed mess of a shoot-out sequence. And besides, what were the two black guys doing in the film, anyway? The film would have lost nothing if they'd been edited out, and the screen time thus gained could have been put to better use.
But the biggest disappointment of Kaminey is that the all characters are nothing more than cardboard cutouts: the lisping bookie, the stammering Romeo, the cigar-smoking don, the diabetic criminal-politician — none of them engage you beyond the first look. On screen, they spout cool dialogues, and evoke a smile or a laugh. At the human level, they don't exist. Another problem is the pacing of the narrative: it's needlessly fast too much of the time, with the result that you end up just skimming the surface of the story.
I can only speculate on the reasons why Bhardwaj messed up with Kaminey. I think he has learnt all the wrong (from the artistic point of view) and right (from the commercial point of view) lessons from his earlier films, Maqbool and Omkara, not to mention Makdee and Blue Umbrella. These films were all critical successes. But for all their cinematic bravura, they were no great shakes commercially. They were not flops by any means, but they didn't exactly set the box office on fire, unlike lesser films by lesser directors with a decidedly lower wattage in terms of star power. Evidently, some concessions were called for. For example, you can't expect to boom at the box office when all your main characters die at the end, can you? As they did in Maqbool and Omkara? To be charitable to Bhardwaj, my guess is that in Kaminey he consciously chose to sacrifice the integrity of the story for a better performance at the box office. And if that was his objective, I think he has succeeded. But its success at the box office would also be an ironic comment on Bhardwaj's own legacy (till Kaminey) as a filmmaker, which is to demonstrate that you can, as a mainstream director, with a mainstream cast, still make films that can compare with any being made in the world for their sheer brilliance and originality.
Kaminey, sadly, is neither original nor brilliant. It's merely cool.
