Thanks to a commentator’s recommendations of important Salman movies, I just watched Garv: Pride and Honor.  I am so glad I did!  Because it is important not just as a Salman movie (I am thinking this was a big turning point as he went from romantic hero to action hero?), but as a perfect example of the modern Indian action movie.  Which is why it is good to see before Sultan, since this is the standard that Sultan will be breaking away from.

If there was a checklist for Indian action films, Garv would hit all the notes.  Actually, Garv would serve as the checklist!  Well, except that Amrish Puri was a good guy.  That was weird.  And Anupum Kehr was a bad guy.  Also odd.  Not unheard of, just strange.  And the actual bad guy was played by Mukesh Rishi, who is almost always the bad guy, but I knew him first from Run and Sarfarosh, so it is odd for me personally to see him being evil.  But besides casting, this is like the typicalist-typical Hindi action film.

(Came out the same year as Garv.  That must have been so odd for audiences who saw them back to back!  First he is the sweet and shy “jeejaji” and then he is the evil terrorist mastermind!)

“Typical” doesn’t mean bad, and I don’t mean it to be an insult.  Especially since Garv helped set up what is now “typical” for the industry.  I was watching it thinking “okay, saw this in Singham 2, saw this in Wanted, saw this in Dabangg” and so on.  And then I had to remember that Garv came out before all of those movies, so they were all imitating Garv, not the other way around.

Before I move on, I just lost my way down a bit of a wikipedia hole with this film and now my mind is BLOWN!  The director, Puneet Issar, is the guy who almost killed Amitabh!  You know, the guy he was fighting with in the Coolie scene, the one who had to have police protection and go into hiding for a while because of all the vengeance death threats?  Him!  He survived it all, ended up playing Duryodhana in the Mahabharata (so, guy who almost kills Amitabh gets stuck playing the villain?  Hmm).  And he married a Punjabi actress, who’s brother was a child star, including playing young-Dev Anand in Hare Rama Hare Krishna!  Meaning, the child in the sequence below grew up to be the brother-in-law of the guy who almost killed Amitabh Bachchan.  MIND=BLOWN!

Okay, with that out of the way, let’s talk about the film!  And I’m just going to lay the plot out right here, because I can’t talk about anything if I don’t talk about the plot.  It is a very plot driven film.

Noble cop Salman Khan and his partner Arbaaz Khan, under the direction of their commanding officer Amrish Puri, arrest an evil gangster/terrorist.  He threatens their families, and then is released by the court.  He kidnaps Salman’s innocent sister (I think?  At least, he takes some innocent woman captive!) and Salman shoots him.  Oh, this is after Salman and Arbaaz had a conversation in a dance bar where Salman flung his gun back and forth and talked about how they have these guns but are afraid to use them.  And we also found out that dance bar girl Shilpa Shetty has a crush on Salman and vice versa, but he is afraid to admit it.

After killing one bad guy and getting away with it, the whole mindset of the police changes.  With Salman taking the lead, they turn into “encounter” specialists, big gun battles and no mercy and stuff.  Meanwhile, in Dubai, the top gangster/terrorist Mukesh Rishi is getting angrier and angrier.  Finally, he comes to India himself and sends his men to capture Salman’s sister.  Salman goes to rescue her, after she has already been raped, and of course he kills a whole bunch of people.  Including the corrupt politician that Mukesh Rishi put in power.  Which is why he is now on trial, because this whole thing is a flashback.  Only, at the last minute, his sister appears to testify and tells what happened to her (which Salman was refusing to talk about, thus leading him to appear guilty), and the judge frees Salman, and the crowds cheer for him, and that’s the end.

So, here is what this movie does well.  It makes you feel a vicarious thrill of power by seeing how easily Salman defeats his enemies.  It also gives you a vicarious thrill of self-righteousness at how eeeeeeeeeeeeevil the bad guys are.  It sidelines the romance in favor of the familial relationships, which is very old-school 70s stuff.  Speaking of old-school 70s stuff, the hero’s best friend is Muslim, which is also cool.  I did have a moment of “wait, they are brothers in real life but in this movie one is Hindu and one is Muslim?”  But then I remembered that the Khan family actually is so very very religiously diverse that this makes sense.  Heck, they could have had Sohail play a 3rd friend who is Christian, and it still would have made sense!

I also liked that the heroine is a “bad woman” but she isn’t punished for it.  She dances in a bar, but her love is true, and Salman loves her back.  Okay, so he wants her to dress a little more modestly, but it’s not like she needs to be punished for her past actions or anything like that.  The only thing I wish we could have gotten more of was Salman’s mother Farida Jalal welcoming her into the family.  I wanted the cooking lesson scene from Kaalia!

I also liked that the hero’s sister wasn’t punished for being raped.  At least, I don’t think so?  She was engaged already, to a guy she had been dating, which was also very cool that there was no judgement over her dating someone and finding her own partner.  And there wasn’t an explicit scene in which the engagement was broken post-rape, so I’m going to go ahead and assume that it was still on.

So, all of this was good, and it was a well-made fast-paced film, but I still hope Sultan is nothing like it.  Because Garv is all about external actions.  You kill this guy, you hit that guy, you make a big speech in court, etc. etc.  There is minimal internal action, minimal character growth or change.  Even someone like Shilpa, her character is defined more by what clothes she wears than anything else.  And the plot unrolls before you in the most predictable way possible.  Which, again, isn’t really a problem.  Predictable can be good, it can be satisfying.  But all of this works because of the kind of movie this is, a simple cops and bad guys story.  It doesn’t work if a film is trying to be something else.

Sultan looks like it wants to be something else, like it wants to deal not just with good guys and bad guys, or maybe not with bad guys at all, but more about how the “good guys” can change and grow and be different over time.  It’s not “good guys” at all, really.  It’s “young and in love guy” and “overly confident happy in his life guy” and “depressed and angry guy” and “still depressed but with a burning desire that fuels his goals guy” and finally “guy who has found something that can return some small measure of happiness to his life guy”.  I don’t want Sultan to have characters defined by what they do, I want them defined by what they feel.  And I don’t want a plot that unrolls with inevitability, I want one that sweeps me up in it to the point that I can no longer predict what will happen next.  I want a film that says “Okay, I know the kind of movie you are used to, and this is going to be nothing like that.”