I posted a quick review without spoilers yesterday, I usually post another with spoilers discussing the plot in detail.  But in this case, there is so little plot, I might as well combine the spoiler-y review with the summary and get them both out of the way.

We open with boats.  And rain.  And a filter that feels very non-Indian.  Kind of grey with hard edges.  On the waterfront, a figure wearing a raincoat hood over his head walks along.  Close up on his hand with callused knuckles poking at a fish. The fishmonger lady says that they are fresh, if he doesn’t believe it, he can go fish for himself.  And the camera flips up under the hood to reveal…John Abraham!  My friend sitting next to me says “Wait, what happened to his face?!?!?”  And then we had a whispered discussing about the unlikelihood of late in life acne/acne scars in men versus women that resolves with an agreement that the steroids must have messed up his hormones.

John Abraham onscreen is not thinking about his face.  Well, his character is not thinking about his face, I don’t know about John himself.  He is seeing a bouquet of white flowers which makes him suddenly flashback to a happy love song with his wife.  Which is all apparently also a huge product placement for vacationing in Seychulles, complete with many many signposts and even an airline.

 

Song over, he is back to walking through the depressing rain, into a falling down looking apartment building, walking up the stairs when he hears something behind him, stops, and says “Chor!  Come out!”  And an adorable little girl comes out from behind him, swearing that she has given up thieving, but she does need money.  So he opens up the pawn shop he apparently runs out of his apartment and gives her cash in return for her ipod.  From the dialogue, this is something they do regularly, she gives him an mp3 player with songs on it for him to listen to, he gives her money, and then later he gives it back for her to keep until she needs money again.  Also part of the little dance, as she is walking away, he opens up his fish bag slightly, so the smell will go out, and she turns back and awkwardly hints that she wouldn’t mind having dinner with him, if he is making fish curry.

Cut to, inside his apartment, she is chatting away, perfectly comfortable, telling him about her business plan, to buy materials for manicures with the money and then get her classmates to pay her to paint their nails.  In the middle of dinner, there is a banging on the door, her mother is calling for her.  The little girl says she doesn’t want to leave, because then her mother won’t let her have fish curry.  John Abraham goes out, there is a beautiful heavily made up and slightly drunk or high seeming woman out front.  She wants to pawn a camera, and also is yelling at him to stop hiding her daughter in his apartment.  John is blocking the door, but looks back and sees that the little girl is hiding under the table.  In an early sign of his surprising physical abilities, John reaches with his back leg straight out, and manages to push the extra plate off the table and into the little girl’s hands.  She grabs it, and he opens the door wide, so her mother can see that there is only one lonely plate on the table with no one.

After dinner, the little girl keeps talking to him, saying that everyone in the building calls him “Handsome”.  But they call her “Dustbin”.  Because her mother says she kicked a dustbin, and then the little girl came into her tummy.  I’m guessing this is supposed to be some dark story that shows how innocent the girl is for not realizing what it really means, but I must be pretty innocent too, because I have no idea what she means!

After dinner, little girl goes back to the apartment, to see her mother is completely out of it, in a drug haze.  In the middle of the night, there are sounds from the other apartment, sex type sounds, and the little girl bangs on John Abraham’s door, asking if she can stay, just for the night.  John Abraham silently puts fresh sheets on the bed and tucks her in, then goes to sleep at the table.

The next morning, he wakes up and sees a note on the fridge.  It says she did the best she could, but she didn’t have her materials.  And he looks at his hand and sees that one of his fingers had a yellow smiley face painted on it.  Awwww!  And then he takes a bus and visits a cemetery.  Fun!  He does listen to the little girl’s ipod on the way, but we only get non-diegetic music hear, so I don’t know what he listened to.  Oh, and the gravestone is for a woman who died at age 26.  So, I’m thinking, his flashback wife Shruti.

Day trip over, he comes walking down the street in Goa in front of that one really cool church.  You know, the one with the steps.  Little girl is in a school uniform and being yelled at by the cops and her teacher because she took a little boys backpack.  She claims she was just seeing how it fit, since she doesn’t have a backpack.  The cops and her teacher try to get her to tell them how to contact her mother.  She keeps putting them off, then sees John Abraham walking up, points to him, and claims that is his father.  The cops call out to him,. he just keeps walking.

It’s a nice shot and sequence and all that, but this is also one of the scenes that is most unbelievable in being transported from Korea to India.  Because there is NO ONE else on the street.  It’s this gorgeous arrangement, a small clustered group in brown on the left side of the frame, a big grey stone wall behind, and then over to the right John Abraham as one big still figure in black.  But I just don’t believe that there wouldn’t be other kids running around after school, parents picking up, anybody else around?

John catches up with the little girl back in their neighborhood, just in time to see her steal something from the neighborhood store.  He goes up to the counter and tells the clerk that she asked him to pay.  The clerk knows he is lying, but doesn’t care.  Tells him that he needs to pay more attention to his daughter, that kids need time, not just money.  John looks blank.  I think the character is supposed to be so heartbroken and cold that he always looks blank, but I have to say, it also kind of leans into John Abraham’s “acting” strong suit.

He goes after the little girl and hands her back her mp3.  She proceeds to give him a long and not very good monologue.  It’s not her fault, this kid is super cute and charming, but a big speech like this is just not doable by a little kid.  Oh, and her point is that he should be willing to reach out help people, build a connection, blah blah blah.  And then at the end, she hands him the thing she stole, which is a Magic-The Gathering style playing card of a Warrior-King.  She tells him it is for him, it is very powerful, nothing can destroy him while he holds it.  And then she goes home.

John goes home too, and then stands outside his door and sees the lock is broken.  He looks at it for a moment, then there is a quick cut and he runs down the stairs, out of the building, and sees a car pulling out.  He runs after it and sees the little girl pounding on the back window calling for him to help her.  He runs and runs and finally can’t run any more and the car pulls away.

And time for exposition!  It’s basically the same scene I always talk over in Don.  A police officer going through a slideshow explaining, here’s the top mob guy, here’s his top lieutenant, and so on and so on.  I do like the cop who is giving the speech.  Although he has his sleeves rolled up like in Miami Vice the entire movie, which is distracting.  The point is, they have one month to round up all the criminals in Goa.  Oh, and this all takes place a month ago.

One month after the lecture (so, the timeline we started in), and song!  It’s at a dance club, and it’s kind of like that brilliant song sequence Farah put together for Sarfarosh, cutting between the women dancing on stage and the cops and criminals maneuvering in the audience.  There is a little bit of a twist to it though, because we the audience recognize the lead dancer as the little girl’s mother.  And there’s a bigger twist when the whole plan goes to heck because of her!

There is a drug hand-off, the big scary guy nicknamed “Football” is attacked by a bunch of cops, but they can’t hold him.  The waiter who took the drugs never comes out the back where the rest of the team is waiting.  The whole month long plan fails.  Because the dancer, the little girl’s mother, hides in the back, hits the waiter with a cricket bat, and takes off with the money!  It’s kind of weirdly female empowering, that the ignored sexy dancer manages to throw a wrench into the plans of both the manly-manly cops and the criminals.  And then she gets high and rides a motorcycle with her boyfriend.  And then goes home and has sex, which the little girl walks in on, which is why she goes over to spend the night with John Abraham, as we already saw.

But then we are back to the present, and we see the little girl in her school uniform walk into her apartment to see a creepy guy holding her mother and shoving a hot hair dryer against her leg.  The mother screams out for her daughter to leave and run, but the little girl freezes.  The creepy guy takes a break from the torture to lift the hair dryer up and blow it on his face, which is super creepy!  Mother keeps screaming for little girl to run, but a East Asian looking guy who is sitting in the corner quietly stands up, walks behind her, and grabs her, covering her eyes.

I am sure this is all straight from the Korean original, but I like how they are handling the mother.  Yes, she is an addict and she brings men home and she forgets to give her daughter food.  But on the other hand, she is also somehow paying her daughter’s school fees and getting her to school, and getting her nice clothes, and when it gets down to it and she is being tortured, her first thought is to get her daughter away to safety.  I’m not saying she’s a good mother, but they didn’t make her a completely irredeemable mother.

And then we cut from this scene back to the cops exploring the restaurant the night everything went bad.  The back and forth between time and perspective in this section is really well down, and again I’m going to go ahead and give credit to the original.  Anyway, the cops have figured out what happened, that someone stole the drugs, which also ruined their case.  They have to let “Football”, their big arrest, go.  But they give him a threat as he walks away, that they are still after him and will catch him.

And then we see the bad guys’ perspective on all these events.  First, they get yelled at by some fancy guy in a velvet jacket who tells them they messed up, there are 10 million drug addicts in India, and they lost the first product they were given to handle.  If they mess up again, he will cut them up and sell their organs.  Naturally, this stings a little, so they decide to investigate and track down the product.  The bad guys have the waiter tied up and are torturing him.  He says that the smelled a woman’s perfume before he was hit, that’s all he remembers!  He is a little aggressive about it by this point, it seems like he has been answering questions for a while and is tired of it.  The head of the gang (who I think my actually be played by the director of the film?  He’s fine, but his directing is better.  He’s no Amol Gupte.) goes over to him and says “You are mad at me?  I get mad at you!”  And then he kills him.

Then he calls scary guy with the ponytail, who calls him “Brother!” in English, it sounds weird, because this guy is weird.  He is also hanging out in a swimming pool with a bunch of white girls in bikinis while he is talking.  He meets up with the other guy we saw, they burst into her apartment and ask for the drugs.

And then we are back to John Abraham reaching his door and seeing it has been opened.  He walks in anyway and sees “Football” and a young guy seaching through the stuff in his pawn shop.  The pull a knife on him.  He quietly pulls out his wallet and hands it over.  They throw it away saying “Hey!  Do we look like pickpockets?  We want the camera bag Anna gave you!”  He says it hasn’t been paid off yet, he can’t give it over.  The kid pulls a knife on him, and he grabs knife and throws it in the sink so fast the kid can’t even react.  Then, we cut to outside, and see from below the building a window breaking as something is pushed against it.  The head bad guy/director in the car below pulls out his phone and calls the guys up above who say they have a small problem.  The “Football” guy is lying on the floor knocked out and the kid looks scared.  He asks what is taking so long, and then tells them to hand the phone to John Abraham.  John takes the phone, just in turn to hear the little girl and her mother screaming.  And then the bad guy screaming, because the little girl bit his hand.  John says he will do whatever, but he says it calmly, not scared, which should have tipped off the bad guys that he’s not a normal pawn shop owner.  Well, that, and he’s built like John Abraham.

He gives the the camera bag, and then asks for the little girl to be free.  They tell him “maybe later”, basically, and hang up.  So he shoots the “Football” with the kids gun, then grabs the knife and the phone and runs down into the street chasing the car, which is where we came in.

The bad guys have a discussion about him at the same time that the cops are looking at the dead guys in his apartment.  The bad guys decide, someone with these skills can be used as a “postman”.  So they call him on the phone he still has and tell him to go to a certain lot and pick up a car with a certain plate.  They watch and laugh while he picks it up.  I have a bad feeling about this.  Then they tell him to go to a certain address, and get a bag from a locker.  Then throw away the phone, get back in the car, and drive to a half completed apartment construction site, go to a certain unit, and hand over the bag.

John isn’t a complete idiot, he does at least dig through the bag and find the drugs that are hidden inside, so he knows a little about what he is walking into.  And he takes the knife he took off that first bad guy and sticks it in his sock.  He is more prepared, it turns out, than the guy he is meeting knows, since he is preparing for a meeting with a Russian contact.  Oh, and it’s the velvet jacket guy we saw yelling at the director/bad guy earlier.  He is talking with his Russian tutor, practicing, and when John arrives, he greets him in Russian.  Again, I am guessing this is from the original, but I would also love it if it was a joke about John playing Russian in 7 Khoon Maaf.

Finally, John breaks in and just asks him in Hindi where the little girl is, since he brought the drugs.  The Velvet Jacket guy figures out what is happening, that the director/bad guy set him up and immediately orders his guys to escape, leaving John Abraham for the cops.  So they grab him (great visual of like five guys holding onto the huge mass of muscle that is John) and throw him out the window.  He lands on a sort of fencing net that was set up to cover the parking area.  He comes back to consciousness just in time to see the velvet jacket guy jumping into a car and pulling away.  He pulls the knife from his sock and cuts through the fence (how good is this knife?), leaps to the ground, just in time to see a bunch of cops pulling up and pulling out guns to start shooting at the velvet jacket guys gang.  He makes meaningful eye contact with the Miami Vice head cop guy (not like they are falling in love, more like they are recognizing each others strength), and then runs through the gun fight to jump into the car he took and chase velvet jacket guy’s car.  Velvet guy thinks fast and manages to run into our hero’s car, forcing it to stop, while he speeds off.  John gets out, looks at all the cops, for a moment it seems like he is going to make a run for it, but then he looks in the trunk, which has popped open after the accident, and stops.  All the cops come running up, also look in the trunk, also stop.  What’s in the trunk?!?!?

Of course, it is little girl’s mother.  Actually, it is her dead naked body with massive scars on the stomach.  It is at this point that I start to worry about the little kids who are in the theater with me.  I mean, this is really harsh for an Indian movie.  Kind of run of the mill for a Korean, but harsh for an Indian.

They cops take John and the Russian teacher guy back to the station.  John is handcuffed and sitting across the desk from one of the head cops (not the head-head cop with whom he had the meeting of the minds, but another cop).  The cop is laying it out for them, the woman had every organ removed from her body, plus her corneas, and the autopsy shows that she was alive for most of it.  Ewwww!  Also, remember how I was so glad that Traffic had that good message about organ donation?  Yeah, this movie, not so much!  The whole thing is just used for body horror.

Despite the gross talk, the Russian teacher is still hungry and asks for food.  And then we cut to the head cop guy who is staring down at the Russian teacher, laying (lying?) on the table, knocked out.  He asks, “What happened?”  And the computer guy pulls up the tape.  It’s pretty awesome.  The take the handcuffs off John so he can eat.  He grabs the tray of food and uses it to knock out the cop and the translator, then shoves back off the desk, leaps up, knocks out the guy who comes in through the door, and then walks out into the office, where there is a whole row of guys sitting at desks looking at him.  They all get up off their desks, and start towards him, and he just goes down the line, knocking them all out.  The computer tech watching the footage keeps marking the time, counting off just how few seconds it took him to destroy their entire squad.  Who is this guy?

Computer tech goes to the next part of his presentation, that they ran him through the system and hit a special security lock, like national security level.  But, he has a way around it.  If they send an email from his account to the White House, the US will lean on India to unlock his records, and then they can see them.  I love this!  And again, giving credit to the original for it.  But the idea of using America’s paranoia for their own purposes is so clever!

Meanwhile, John is investigating.  He digs through the trash until he finds the phone he threw away.  Then he looks at the label on the back and goes to the store it came from.  He walks in, right to the back, where there is some kind of sleezy deal going down, with a poor guy in glasses being beaten up.  I think he might be trying to buy an organ for his wife?  Anyway, he’s not a tough gangster guy like everyone else.  John beats up everyone else, then finally the head bad guy is willing to give him a business card to contact the next person up the chain.

I think this is when we come back to the cops.  They have the unlocked file.  John Abraham was a high level government assassin.  Well, no duh!  They run through all the things he has done, killed dozens of people, fearless, undercover, would do anything.  And we see a flashback to him killing a whole bunch of people.  Little cynical here, the description goes “a killer, fearless, cold, no emotion, done things you can’t even imagine–A patriot.”  And then he was in a car accident (photo of a car all smashed by a truck).  His civilian passenger was taken to a civilian hospital, but he was taken to a military one.  Also, his wounds included bullet wounds.  So, yeah, there is more to learn about this accident.  Anyway, they end by saying his codename was “Rocky”.  And, splitscreen!  Flashback John walking away from an explosion has “Rocky” written over him, while present day John in a suit is walking down the street away from where he beat up all those guys, with “Handsome” written across.  It’s the title of the movie!  “Rocky Handsome!”  Oh, and Interval.

And, song!  We are in a nightclub with black light and lots of glowing neon and dancers.  John arrives on the first floor of the club and gets into an elevator.  Just as the doors are closing, the director/head bad guy jumps in with him.  At first it seems like they don’t recognize each other.  But then the bad guy hops on his cell phone and calls his hench goon, warning him to get everyone out of the club.  Meanwhile, the cops have also arrived, somehow also knowing something is about to go down.

The kid who threatened John with the knife is waiting for a meeting in a bathroom.  Actually, he is making out with a girl in a bathroom stall.  The glasses guy from the cell phone place comes in to talk to him.  As soon as young guy acknowledges they are there and ready to sell organs, John bursts in and tells glasses guy to leave.  He grabs the young guy and throws him around, asking where the little girl is.  Young guy claims he doesn’t know, just that she was given to “Auntie”.  And maybe his bosses can help find Auntie.  Having learned all he can, John shoots him.  At which point East Asian guy bursts in.  He doesn’t see John, so he starts shooting through the center of every bathroom stall door.  Then he kicks them open, one by one, finally seeing blood on the last one.  Only when he looks down, it is the woman the young guy was making out with lying dead on the floor, while John is standing along the wall.  And then super cool fight!  They are in the tiny space of the bathroom stall, so neither of them can move much, but they do awesome little close-up battle with their hands.

He manages to shoot John, but John gets out, through the club, and since the cops are there, the bad guys all leave as well.  And, flashback!   Well, first John stumbles out to the parking lot, holding an axe (for some reason the bad guys keep using axes.  Wouldn’t a knife be more practical), and a guy throws him his car keys immediately, just because he is John Abraham standing there with an axe.  He drives the car to a really nice house, goes inside, we see pictures of Shruti on the wall, he patches himself up, and flashes back in song to his happy happy life.  You know, when he was constantly killing people, but it was okay because it was for the government.

Shruti is pregnant, they are getting an ultrasound at the hospital.  They leave, she is sitting in the car, looks up and smiles at him as he comes down the steps holding the ultrasound photo.  And then a truck comes out of nowhere and smashes the car!  The driver leaps out and shoots John.  He falls to the steps, but the whole time keeps looking at the car, which is a smashed mess.  It’s a really nice visual of how his whole life is over all of a sudden, going from a happy woman smiling at him to a smashed car.  But, if he has this nice house sitting empty, with the water still on even (of course, we get a lingering shower shot), why is he living in the slums running a pawn shop?

Back to the cops!  Oh, and somewhere in here, the bad guys torture and kill the velvet jacket guy, but I don’t care about that.  Now, the cops are getting an explanation from a guy they arrested about how the drug trade works, and uses children.  Oh, I forgot!  Somewhere in here, we had a brief glimpse of the little girl being handed over to a scary looking old woman who takes her to a back room with a bunch of other kids and locks them all in.  So she is being forced to work for the bad guys, just like every other child.

So, the cops explain, and it is very complicated!  The kids pick up the drugs, hand them off to someone else, get a bag with atm cards hidden in it, go to an atm and run them all up (this is how the cops know the little girl is alive, because they saw her in a atm video), and meanwhile the customers for the drugs have reported the atm cards stolen.  So the bad guys get a bunch of cash from the atm, while the customers have plausible deniability.

John follows a kid who is doing all of this, but the cops have put out his face, and some random traffic cops see him and start chasing him.  Run run, chase chase, non lethal force used to stop a cop, and then he has no other choice, so he jumps out a window!  And chases a car that is pulling away with the kids inside of it.

This seems really soon, but I think we may already be at the climax?  Oh, there were two small scenes that matter in the middle.  We see our little girl, now dressed in dirty ill-fitting clothes (again, her mother wasn’t that bad, at least she was clean and well-dressed), hanging out with a bunch of other kids when a slightly older girl is being taken away to go back to her parents.  The evil Auntie tells them that if they are good, someday they can go home like here.  Oh, and she thanks our little girl for doing her nails.  The East Asian guy is sitting there watching this, and our little girl notices him, sees a cut on his forehead, and pulls out a bright cartoon band-aid and sticks it on him.

So now, climax!  Our hero has followed the car to another under construction building.  inside, there is a drug lab being run by kids.  The creepy ponytail guy is supervising with a mask on, but the kids are being exposed to the fumes.  One little girl passes out.  The ponytail guy orders for her to be taken out.  John follows her as she is carried into another room.  At this point, I think he may actually be planning to just leave these kids here, since they aren’t the ones he wanted.  Also, the cops have known all along that the kids are being used like this and haven’t bothered to do anything?  I know they need evidence to arrest people on the drug charges, but couldn’t they just go in at any point and take these kids to an orphanage or something?  Isn’t that more important than building a drug case?

Thank goodness, John agrees with me and is all “Save the Kids!” here.  First, he goes into the room where the passed out girl was taken.  A surgeon is about to knock her out, so he beats up the surgeon, and then opens a bunch of drawers in the room to find cut up bodies.  Including one that we only see the little hand, still with fingernail polish on it.  Oh man!  She didn’t go to her parents, she went to a creepy back room to have her organs harvested!

So, now John is really angry.  He goes into the other room, with the drug lab, beats up the creepy ponytail guy pretty hard, then ties him up and shoots a nail gun into his leg.  Then he calls up the big bad guy/the director and tells him that he better come soon and bring his little girl if he ever wants to see his brother again.  And he holds up the phone so creepy ponytail guy can get off one more “Brother!”.  Then he sets up a trap, puts a lantern balanced on one edge of the table, being held by a bag of drugs on the other, punctures the bag, and as it empties, the lantern tips farther and farther over the edge, closer to the flammable stuff on the floor.

Thank goodness, right before the explosion, we have a cut to show that John is standing outside with all the kids, so he didn’t forget about them!  And then he calls the head cop and has him listen to the explosion.  Which is cool, he doesn’t even say anything, just holds the phone up so the cop can hear.  Then he hangs up and tells the kids to wait here, someone will be coming for them soon.

And then he goes to a cool church for some reason for the final confrontation?  I mean, I know the reason, it’s a John Woo homage, plus churches look cool, but I don’t think it was ever mentioned in dialogue before this where exactly they would meet.  So I don’t know how everyone knew to come here.

(The Killer is so awesome)

Anyway, fight!  Really cool and long fight.  That starts when the big bad guy hands our hero a vial and says it has the little girl’s eyes in it.  Because she wasn’t old enough for them to use any of her other organs, but corneas are always good.  Ewwwwwww!  And also, this is not going to make people more willing to donate organs!  John takes a moment, then slowly takes of his jacket, kneels down to put it over the vial, then leaps up with a gun in his hand that he had hidden in the jacket and kills everybody!

The fight is a lot more complicated than that, there is a ton of knife work and precise punches and cool stuff.  It culminates, as we knew it would, with a stand off with the cool East Asian guy.  He pulls a gun on John, then throws it away and pulls out a knife, because of course he is the kind of guy who wants to truly test his skill, not take the easy way out.  Knife-knife-knife.  Culminating in East Asian guy stabbing John in the shoulder and then taking his knife away and coming in close, trying to slit his throat.  They are face to face, struggling, John is pushing hard to keep the other knife away.  And then he leans over, grabs the knife in his shoulder with his teeth, and twists his head, thereby yanking out the knife from his shoulder and bring it around in an arc to slice through the East Asian guys neck!  It’s really cool.

But, big bad guy escaped!  John runs out after him, and leaps on his car hood to stop him, then shoots!  And nothing happens.  Big bad guy starts to laugh, he forgot his car is bulletproof!  Here can’t do anything!  Big bad guy calls the cops and plans to just wait in his car until they arrive.  John positions himself on the hood and puts his gun right in the center of the windshield and starts to shoot.  He shoots over and over again, right on the glass, and nothing happens.  But then it starts to crack.  Finally, a small hole appears.  He wriggles the nozzle of the fun right into it, and shoots.  Big Bad Guy is dead!

But, you know, John is still super depressed.  He kneels down in front of the church and puts the gun to his head, flashing back on his happy times with his wife, the little girl, the music swells (it’s a bit much, really), the lyrics begging for mercy from God come on.  And then, mercy happens!  The little girl sneaks out from behind the church and sees him!  Flashback!  She was in the back of an ambulance, creepy surgeon guy was going to cut her eyes out, East Asian guy was watching, and then he leaned forward and reached for the surgeon, cut to outside and see the ambulance rocking with screams coming.  Aw, East Asian guy had a moment of mercy!  He killed the surgeon and handed over his eyeballs instead!  It’s just like Snow White!

Little girl runs over to John and hugs him (ow ow ow ow ow!  He has been shot and stabbed like a million times!  Don’t hug so hard!).  And then the cops arrive.  John is put in the back of a car, but the head cop asks if the little girl can ride with him, so they can have some time.  Riding along back to headquarters, little girl curled up with her head on his lap, John asks if they can stop for a moment.  All the police cars pull up and stop together in front of the store with the nice clerk from the beginning.  John gets out, picks out a pink backpack, and loads it with all the standard school supplies.  He goes out and puts it on the little girl and tells her “That time, I didn’t acknowledge you in front of two police officers.  Now, the whole police force knows I know you.  Now, I have to go away for some time, but you will be all right until I come back.”  The little girl nods.  I think, “No!  She’s not going to be fine!  She has no parents!  Maybe the shop owner can adopt her?”  And then she says that John is smiling for the first time!  John is smiling!  He still has the dimples!  and then he asks her for a hug.  And hug hug hug hug, his little still painted yellow nail resting on her pink backpack.  And music swells, and end!

Huh!  That was so weird!  Is what I think in the theater.  So not Indian!  The other Korean remake I have seen, Ek Villain, really mashed up the original plot to give us a happy hopeful ending.  but this one kept the original ending pretty much in tact (so far as I can tell from the online plot summary, I haven’t seen the original), and it’s kind of open-ended and downbeat.  Like I said, not Indian.