New Sholay - Ram Gopal Varma

ONE of the most hyped movies to come out of the Bollywood factory has bombed at the box-office, causing everyone to wonder if remakes are a good idea at all.

The magic of the epic revenge drama of the mid-70s Sholay was hard to replicate. But celebrated filmmaker Ram Gopal Varma was determined to pay tribute to Ramesh Sippy’s celluloid gold.

His Ram Gopal Varma Ki Aag, released in a blaze of high-octane PR build-up neither had Sholay (embers) nor, of course, Aag (inferno). It was such a damp squib that many theatres dumped it mid-week, choosing to screen other low-budget winners instead.

Varma, a prolific filmmaker with a decent record of gangster films – remember Company, Satya, Sarkar, and that super-duper romantic Aamir Khan- Urmila Matondkar hit Rangeela? – spared no expense on the remake of the 1975 classic.

He hired Amitabh Bachchan and assembled a cast of old and brand-new actors to rehash the most bone-chilling story of revenge ever told on the big screen.

Ramu, as he is known in the film world, is a self-confessed fan of Sholay, having seen the film 35 times since he first saw it as a mere schoolboy.

In his umpteenth print and television interview before the release of Aag on the last Friday of last month, Varma showered praise on Sholay: “I am the biggest fan of the original film.

“I love Ramesh Sippy (producer-director of Sholay). His work has been my source of inspiration. Sholay is way better than my film. I am not competing.”

For close to two years, he had ensured that his remake of Bollywood’s most successful film yet remained in the news.

If it was not that Bachchan, who had played alongside Dharmendra as the roguish hero-duo in the original would now play the legendary villain Gabbar Singh, made famous by the late Amjad Khan, Varma had other ways to tickle the curiosity of a film-crazy nation.

One week the media reported that Ajay Devan would essay the role of Dharmendra in the original. Now, who can forget Dharmendra’s character Veeru in Sholay threatening to commit ’soocide’ by jumping from atop the village tank if he could not get Hema Malini, the heroine playing the role of Basanti, the horse-cart driver (tongawalli), to marry him.

Indeed, Dharmendra won the last parliamentary poll in 2004 by obliging his constituents who invariably asked him to re-enact the “soocide” scene on the campaign trail.

If all else failed, the legal hassles that came in the way of Varma kept his under-production film in the news. Because he had originally named his film Sholay II, the family of the late Ramesh Sippy dragged Varma to court.

After a protracted legal battle, Varma was denied the right to use Sholay.

Having kept the film in news for long, a couple of months before it was due for release, Varma named it Ram Gopal Varma Ki Aag. His ego seemed to have got the better of his judgment.

And that ego was smashed to pieces by cine-goers. The uniform verdict of filmgoers and critics is overwhelmingly negative.

Wrote Nikhat Kazmi, easily one the more discerning film critics, about Varma’s latest offering: “Nothing seems to work for the film.

“Neither the new setting where Ramgarh becomes Kaliganj, a seaside suburb of Mumbai where real estate prices are rocketing and spurring crime, nor the quintessential revenge plot where an ex-cop (Mohanlal) hires two goons (Heero and Raj, instead of Veeru and Jai in the original) to settle scores with the evil gangster (Babban instead of Gabbar) who has created a reign of terror in the impoverished township.

“Surprisingly, even Amitabh Bachchan fails to live up to the grandeur of Amjad Khan’s tobacco-chewing Gabbar Singh. Of course he tries hard to lend the character a new menace, but all that shaky tongue-twisting, the tubercular cough and the onion breath storm fail to stand up to the simple majesty of the ’70s dacoit.”

Every other critic too has panned the film. As did the ordinary cine-goers who in spite of the hype surrounding the film chose to stay away from cinema halls showing one of the more expensive films of recent years.

Admittedly, remakes haven’t met with approval at the box-office.

Whether it was Shah Rukh Khan’s Don or Aishwarya Rai’s Umrao Jaan, they did not quite set the cash registers ringing with their replication of the roles sensitively essayed by Bachchan and Rekha, respectively, in these films more than two decades ago.

Varma seems to have gone incommunicado, not available for comment on his box-office dud.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 10th, 2007 at 4:29 pm and is filed under , . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.