Another day, another underwhelming Bollywood remake of a Tamil/Telugu/ Malayalam film — this was the abiding sentiment towards the end of the media show last month, for the Varun Dhawan-starrer Baby John, directed by Kalees. The film is the official Hindi remake of the 2016 Tamil action thriller Theri, starring Vijay and directed by hit merchant Atlee (who has produced Baby John).
In the film, super-cop Satya Verma (Dhawan) fakes his death and builds a new identity for himself (as John D’Silva) and his little daughter in a sleepy Kerala town, after vindictive mob boss Babbar Sher (Jackie Shroff) kills his wife and mother in an ambush. When his daughter’s teacher Tara (Wamiqa Gabbi) tries to speak to John in Malayalam, he says he doesn’t know the language. Soon afterwards, when John is confronted by someone who knew him as Satya, he lets loose a stream of stilted Malayalam, surprising Tara and alerting her to the fact that there’s something amiss here.
Varun Dhawan in ‘Baby John’, the Hindi remake of the 2016 Tamil action thriller ‘Theri’, starring Vijay.
A Hindi-speaking hero in the middle of an identity crisis chooses to masquerade (poorly) as a dyed-in-the-wool Malayali. I can scarcely think of a more fitting moment to encapsulate Bollywood’s ongoing creative crisis.
For the last four to five years Bollywood has been increasingly dependent on Telugu, Tamil and Malayalam-language movies. Every major star has remade movies from these industries, with the Hindi-language results ranging from middling (Ajay Devgn’s Bholaa, a remake of Lokesh Kanagaraj’s Tamil film Kaithi) to downright awful (Baaghi 3, based on N. Linguswamy’s Vettai) — with the odd notable exception like Pushkar and Gayathri’s Vikram Vedha, an improvement on their already-polished eponymous Tamil film. Some of the biggest Bollywood hits of recent times have come from Tamil and Telugu writers, such as Atlee’s Jawan or Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s Animal. Increasingly, directors from these industries are invited to remake their own films in Hindi because Bollywood doesn’t even trust their own creators to make commercially successful facsimiles. Kannada filmmaker A. Harsha has been announced as the director of the upcoming Tiger Shroff film Baaghi 4, for instance.
(L to R) Actor Vijay Sethupathi, director Atlee and actor Shah Rukh Khan at the promotion of their movie ‘Jawan’ in Mumbai, September 2023.
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The commercial/marketing impact of this phenomenon is significant. One tangible development is that almost every big-budget movie, regardless of industry, has a ‘mixed’ cast these days.
There are representatives from various industries, covering north and south — it’s easier to promote a film with a ‘local’ face, goes the thinking. To cite just two recent examples, Baby John has South star Keerthy Suresh as one of the film’s female leads, while the recent Rajinikanth action-thriller Vettaiyan had Amitabh Bachchan in a key role. Rajini’s next film Coolie has cameos by Nagarjuna (Telugu), Aamir Khan (Hindi) and Upendra (Kannada). Kannada actor Yash of KGF-fame is all set to play Raavan in Nitesh Tiwari’s Hindi-language movie Ramayana, while Ranbir Kapoor and Sai Pallavi play Rama and Sita, respectively.
A still from Tamil action-thriller ‘Vettaiyan’.
And this is hardly the only way in which the nuts and bolts of the Hindi blockbuster are changing. Bollywood action segments have started to resemble scenes one might see in a Prabhas or a Yash movie. Cartoonishly brawny men dispatch legions of attackers while the camera has an aneurysm, deploying dozens of fast-moving cuts in a minute or two. The rapid-fire, over-the-top editing style leaves no room for the scene to breathe, or to even effectively communicate the fight’s emotional stakes, and so on. The hero barely raises his fist and villains fly through the air in an outwardly expanding circle.
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The third big change is of the hirsute persuasion — Bollywood heroes are going all in on big, shaggy-dog beards a la Allu Arjun in the Pushpa films or Yash in KGF. In the most recent big-budget Bollywood release Singham Again, the villain ‘Danger Lanka’ (Arjun Kapoor) is explicitly modelled on a composite of famous Tamil and Telugu-movie characters. He has a beard so large and thick that you expect birds to fly out during the intermission. When Ranveer Singh’s (clean-cut, military-mustachioed) character Sangram sees his foe for the first time, he even remarks: “Kya danger look hai teraa, Danger! Ekdum South Indian hero maafik (What a killer look, Danger, you’re looking just like a South Indian hero).”
Ranbir Kapoor in ‘Animal’.
Now, I am mindful of the fact that sometimes beards, like all visual markers, are informed by cultural osmosis. And yet, one must protest Bollywood’s current one-size-fits-all approach. Under the tutelage of Sandeep Reddy Vanga, first Shahid Kapoor and then Ranbir Kapoor buried their faces underneath layers of Amazonian lip-moss. They are ‘South ka hero’ now, visually and spiritually.
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And so, regardless of the number of times Dhawan copied Vijay’s signature mannerisms in Baby John (the stylised wearing of the bracelet, tap dance-on-cocaine choreography), I did not ‘buy’ the illusion. Bollywood can repeat this gambit over and over again but it’s a cynical performance, one guided more by the pressures of the box office than anything else. Even a good imitation needs a kernel of unconditional love for it to really work.
The writer and journalist is working on his first book of non-fiction.
Published – January 03, 2025 03:23 pm IST
The Hindu Sunday Magazine
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