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Bollywood Part 5: Khakee
8th December 2004, 1.19pm

Nope. Didn't like this one at all. Not my cup of tea in the least. I can imagine that there would be people out there who'd go for this kind of loud, obnoxious testosterone-fest, but I'm not one of them. Three and a half hours of macho crap - yelling, screaming, blood-letting, gunfights, revenge, betrayal, cardboard-cut-out villains, fistfights, chases and explosions puncutated by ham-fisted speeches about honour and duty - is three and a half hours too many. I swear, this is exactly what you'd get if you sucked all the life and imagination out of two Jerry Bruckheimer films and just jammed them end to end.

Anant Srivasta is the police chief who heads a team of specially-picked officers to escort a suspected Pakistani terrorist to his trial and make sure he's not assassinated by his fellow terrorists en route. On the way they uncover a hotbed of government corruption and realise that their prisoner is actually innocent. Amid continual assertions that the corruption they've discovered hasn't made them lose faith in the system, they determine that they'll get their man to the courts and let the impartial and uncorrupt judicial system decide his fate. They just have to get past the entire police force and Anant's old enemy Angre, who's leading the bad cops in the search for their patsy. Most of the good cops are killed along the way, as is the man they were trying to protect, but before he dies he tells them about a file that could convict the corrupt ministers and police officials, so now the chase is on to find the file. Of course they find it, but more of our heroes are slaughtered along the way until it's only Anant and the fresh-faced young recruit left to take a stand. Cue the twenty-minute fistfight between Anant and Angre as a lead-in to bad-guys all getting sentenced to life imprisonment and honour being restored to the system, the victims of the corruption, and the whole god-damn country thanks to our heroes.

The freakiest part about Khakee is the final ten minutes, which sees the squeaky-clean fresh-faced recruit, who earlier in the film beat a guy up for offering a bribe, escort Angre to jail. Of course there's an escape attempt, but then we find out that it's Sri Squeaky-Clean who orchestrated it so that he could shoot Angre dead once he broke out of the van, and then make it look like the whole thing was self-defence. In an attempt to mitigate the questionable morality of this final scene, there's a text-only addendum included as the credits roll, saying "Yeah, he did shoot the bad-guy, but it was a really bad thing to do, and if anyone does that kind of thing in real life then they're bad people, okay?" Oh, I get it. A touch of ambiguity to give the film a realistic touch, yeah? Or maybe just an excuse for another violent death. Who knows? Who cares? The film's over and there's three and a half hours of my life I'm never getting back again.

You can probably guess that I'm going to give this a grand total of zero pakoras out of five.

Related links:

Planet Bollywood - Khakee review

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