Sultan‘s coming out tomorrow, woo!  Which means I can’t put it off any londer, I have to deal with the one part of the film I am really really not looking forward too: Randeep Hooda.

I cannot STAND Randeep Hooda!  He’s like nails on a chalkboard for me.  Which is why I am so upset that he is part of one of my all time favorite films, Once Upon a Time in Mumbai.  Which is also the movie that made me start to hate him.

Once Upon a Time in Mumbai is a great great movie.  It places two forces against each other, the noble and powerful and sort of too big to be contained or understood force of Ajay Devgn; and the scheming and small and outside of society force of Emraan Hashmi.  And then there’s also Randeep Hooda.

When I first saw Randeep Hooda onscreen in this movie, I went “oo!  Who’s the handsome guy in the police uniform?”  And then by about the 3rd time he showed up, I was going, “NO!  Not another police section!  It’s so booooooooooring!”  I thought it was just an issue with this film, that the not-Dawood and not-Hajji characters were so fascinating that any time spent with the police force trying to arrest them would always feel like a waste.  And then I saw Highway.

Highway is really Alia’s movie.  It’s her character’s journey, it’s her performance that drives it, it’s all her.  But, see, that’s not how it had to be from the script.  If you think about the actual narrative, it’s almost a 50/50 split between Alia and Randeep.  But then you watch the film, and Randeep is just so boooooooooooooooooooooring.  I could not care less about his character’s struggle.  I was just marking time until Alia came back onscreen.

Which made me go back and look at Once Upon a Time in Mumbai again.  When you are watching it, it feels like it is the story of Emraan and Ajay with Randeep just there as the narrator.  But if I removed all my emotions and “OMG, Ajay!” feelings, then I could see that Randeep’s role was supposed to be kind of strong.  He was supposed to be the character who made the most of his tiny screen time, who provided the moral balance and audience perspective, who we related to most out of all of them.  Abhishek in the Dhoom films, essentially.

Now, make what jokes you want about Abhishek in Dhoom (and there have been many!), but the movies wouldn’t work without him.  Not because he is the main character, that hasn’t been true since Dhoom 1, but because he is the character who balances the film.  Everyone else is having huge drama and big adventures, and then there’s Jai Dixit, with his glasses, quietly standing to the side and observing it all.  He is the salt that makes all the other flavors stand out.

Or, a more relevant example, Mohanlal in Company.  Mohanlal has a fairly small role, he isn’t part of any of the big action scenes or even any of the big emotional scenes.  He is just around, observing and waiting for his moment to leap in and become part of the story.  But, he’s never boring!  He holds the screen when he is on it, and we can believe that Viviek would trust him at the end of things.  And, through out the film, we have a sense that eventually he will win out, he will become vital to the end of the story.

But then there’s Once Upon a Time in Mumbai.  And I can see, if I focus really hard, how it was supposed to be with Randeep acting as the “salt”.  It was supposed to be the story of the end of an era, through the eyes of the cop who is brought in from outside at the end of that era.  And he was supposed to be what tied it into the “present”, the bomb blasts of 1993.  His outsider perspective was supposed to make us question our sympathies for the criminals, our forgiveness for their actions.

It was also supposed to bring into relief the difference between Ajay and Emraan’s criminals.  How Ajay appeared to be the larger threat, because he was more obviously flouting the laws and had no consideration for the police, while Emraan appeared more non-threatening because of his youth, his connection to the police force, and his sort of puppydog look.  But how we, who were privy to more information than Randeep, knew that Ajay obeyed his own laws, which let him have no fear of the police, while Emraan obeyed nothing, he was willing to appear to obey the laws of the police or of Ajay’s organization, just so long as they served him.

But instead, because of the world of dullness that is Randeep’s performance, it turned into a straight up crime story.  No sense of the police being important or having an effect on anything.  It was just Ajay and Emraan, these huge figures striding across the city, controlling everything.  Which is a great movie!  Maybe a better movie than it would have been otherwise, if the police had been part of it, trying to make the moral balance rest on the State.  In fact, it turns into a more interesting statement this way, making Ajay the moral center and “hero” of the film, set against the ultimate evil that is Emraan.

So, what does this mean for Sultan?  Well, if means I will be gritting my teeth and silently groaning every time Randeep shows up onscreen.  But that’s just me.  Even if you don’t have a strange personal aversion to Randeep Hooda’s stupid face, it is still going to be a distinctive experience having him in this role.  Randeep isn’t a “Star” in the same way that Irrfan or Nawazzudin isn’t a “Star”.  He completely disappears into his roles, he is playing just a character, not a superstar.

Which will be really interesting since, so far as I can tell, Randeep is going to be Salman’s main scene partner in the “sad” half of Sultan.  I talked yesterday about how it looks as though the first half will be the bright and happy half, the one with all the big songs and the general “filmi” feeling as Salman falls in love with Anushka and it is all wonderful.  But that means the second half will be the “real” half.  And we’ve already seen in the trailers how Salman downplays his personality, his joyfulness, in those scenes.

What this makes me wonder is if Randeep’s, shall we say, less than riveting screen presence is a purposeful tool here.  While Salman is being lower energy, they are putting someone who is naturally almost negative energy opposite him.  So Salman is still the focal point of it all, even when he is old and depressed and he is acting with a young and energetic coach at the top of his game.  I mean, we already saw it in the trailer!  Randeep meets him and is all dismissive, and Salman is just standing there looking stolid and tired and old, and yet you watch the trailer and think “Randeep!  Why would you dismiss him!  He has clearly got something more going on inside than you do!”