Mumbai Saga Full Movie Review Fimlyzilla
Movie Trailer
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Short Introduction Of Movie
An epic story with overwhelming machismo, that’s the descriptor on the official trailer of Shootout at Wadala, a film Sanjay Gupta made in 2013.
The one thing you can say about the director is that he’s consistent, eight years later we’re pretty much watching the same film.
Once again John Abraham wearing Tika and coal plays a dreaded Mumbai gangster, here he’s Amartya Rao instead of Manya Surve.
And once again Sanjay is fetishizing dons and guns.
Every second shot is a slow-motion mode to their daring, their outsized testosterone, and their unstinted panache.
With their tight shirts bulging biceps and Ray-Ban glasses, these are criminals positioned as urban cowboys, to this reworking of his own material Sanjay adds lensing choices and camera angles that echo Ram Gopal Varma.
Old-fashioned swag and dialogue baazi that reminds you of Milan Luthria’s Once Upon A Time In Mumbai.
The presence of Emraan Hashmi aids in that and a character modeled on Shiv Sena’s Supremo Bal Thackeray.
Bhau, played by Mahesh Manjrekar is this powerful divisive politician, you’ve seen in umpteen films including Mani Ratnam’s Bombay and Varma’s Sarkar.
There’s also the requisite Ganpati song and an item number by Yo Yo Honey Singh, because how can you have a film about Mumbai gangsters without that.
In short, the film is oxidized wine in a not new bottle.
Sanjay has described Mumbai Saga as his most ambitious film, but the ambition seems to be mostly expended on style and set pieces, rather than a coherent narrative or layered characters.
Cast Of Movie
- John Abraham as Amartya Rao
- Emraan Hashmi as Inspector Vijay Sarvarkar
- Suniel Shetty as Murali Shankar
- Kajal Aggarwal as Seema Rao
- Rohit Roy as Baba
- Anjana Sukhani as Sonali Khaitan
- Mahesh Manjrekar as Bhau
- Prateik Babbar as Arjun Rao
- Gulshan Grover as Nari Khan
- Amole Gupte as Gaitonde
- Samir Soni as a Sunil Khaitan
- Shaad Randhawa as Jagannath
- Vivaan Parashar as Sadashiv
- Ivan Rodrigues as Journalist
- Rohit Kadu Deshmukh
Story Of Movie
The film begins with a gruesome murder on the Mumbai streets in the mid-90s and then flashes back to the events that led to the rise of this lawlessness and of Amartya, who starts out as a lower-middle-class man who quietly pays haftha to the local goons, but when they mess with his younger brother all hell breaks loose and he transforms without hesitation into a killer on a rampage.
Suddenly he’s chopping limbs and breaking bones and no one in his family seems worried, his girlfriend in fact smiles appreciatively.
The connective tissue between seeds is so thin, that it feels like Sanjay who also wrote the story, first decided on the scenes he was excited to create and then found a way to force-fit them into a screenplay.
There’s an elaborate action sequence on an airstrip, another in a Mumbai mandi, and another in a bathroom in which, Amartya goes up against his arch-nemesis encounter crop Vijay Savarkar played by Hashmi.
All of these are staged with precision, but Sanjay and Robin Bhatt who co-wrote the screenplay can’t be bothered to connect the dots, or build tension, or give the depth of the sketchy characters.
Motivation is too much to expect, but these guys don’t even adhere to any internal logic.
Prateik Babbar plays the Anil Kapoor from Parinda figure, Amartya’s younger brother, a good guy who’s inevitably sucked into the bloodshed.
But he doesn’t seem troubled by the turn of events and instantly becomes trigger happy.
Suniel Shetty shows up as a don, who doles out timely advice while looking cool on a boat and then disappears.
Gulshan Grover playing a drug dealer pops in whenever Amartya needs any help.
There’s a track about Bhau’s house identity politics, we see him delivering lines like “marathi ko jo tokega, marathi usko thokega”
But we have little sense of how his fiery parochialism shapes the city and the most bewildering is Vijay.
In an interview, Emraan described the character as a gangster in uniform, in one scene we see Vijay speak proudly about the number of criminals he’s murdered and his favorite place to kill them.
But, suddenly in another scene, he turns heroic and gives his juniors a rousing speech on the khaki Vardi and how they must honor it.
The writing is a mess and the acting isn’t much better. John rages have smashed bodies as he did in Satyamev Jayate, his physicality and presence fill up the frame.
Sanjay showcases him like a mythical hero, even when he is doing horrific things with a razor blade we are meant to admire him.
But to build a character you need more than low-angle shots and slow motion, the only actor who shows some spark is Amol Gupte, playing a gleeful gangster named Gaitonde.
This Gaitonde isn’t a patch on the one in Sacred Games and the character seems like the underwritten cousin of Bhope Bhau, who Amol played in Vishal Bharathwaj’s Kaminey, but at least he’s having fun.
The rest of the men are either surly or smirking, they all work up a sweat trying to match John’s muscles and his swag.
Sunglasses play a prominent role in this creation of coolness.
The lone woman in the frame Kajal Aggarwal does painfully little, Mumbai saga is apparently inspired by true events.
I think there is a compelling story here of how the contours and the conscience of the city shifted in 1996. And what was lost when Bombay became Mumbai.
But Sanjay isn’t really interested in that, his aim is to glorify men and guns, but the tools in his arsenal, slick editing, green-toned filters, and the painfully loud sound design, there isn’t a car in this film that doesn’t screech to a halt, are too limited to fill the hole that is the story.
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