Billa (2007)

So, is this what it's come down to? A disenchantment so severe at the state of Tamil films that you snatch at it's miniscule positives with the savagery of a parched soul offered a jug of cool water.

I am trying my level best to write about how cool Billa is.

Now, there are differing levels of cool, of course. I'm not talking about the stratospheric type of cool that's achieved through the use of inventive, pop culture laced dialogue and shifting timelines a la Tarantino in Pulp Fiction , or ground breaking visual effects that has the most jaded action fan dropping his jaw in The Matrix or 300.

No, this is cool that is scaled way,way, waaaaaaay down the "hot" index, and contextualised within the colossally rigid tropes of a Tamil movie. This is after all, a genre that spawns endless cookie cutter melodramas that are often loud, obnoxious, misogynistic, simplistic and hypocritically Puritan.

So, to find a film that actually boasts some semblance of style, that actually takes the trouble to coat it's frames with a patina of glossy sheen, dress up it's actors in chic garbs, and have them strut like seasoned denizens of the catwalk, is a revelation.

I mean, the above is by now Standard Issue in Bollywood. But Kollywood??? An industry that still routinely pairs Geriatrics with girls fresh off the cusp of adolescence, passes off Dhanush as a hero and most criminally, still allows T.Rajendar to make movies??

I should be talking about how Billa(2007) successfully updates the old Rajini original( original in the loosest sense, as it was a remake of an Amitabh starrer in Hindi called Don, itself updated recently by Farhan Akthar with Shah Rukh Khan) for a modern audience, amping up the action and suspense while keeping the core storyline of a simple man forced to impersonate a ruthless criminal, intact.

I can't...because the film's a train wreck. And in sifting through the detritus, my meager haul of salvageable material are items that should remain in the background, visible to the eye but never overshadowing what should be the movie's main thrust: it's plot, action and suspense...in that order.

Instead, I find myself, for the sake of not writing a review that completely rubbishes the movie, talking about it's slick cinematography, drenching it's scenes in flashy, strobing monochrome images while trying my best (and failing) to ignore the fact that it's in the service of repetitive shots of people strutting towards or away from one another.

I'd like to tell you, that never before, have the sounds of cocking firearms and gunshots sounded so realistically in a Tamil movie, only to be negated by insipidly staged and amateurishly executed action scenes.

I'd like to tell you, that Ajith has never looked this cool before, clothed in designer couture and shades, but also, that despite it, he remains one of the most blandest actors in Tamil films today. See him deliver a line like "I'm back" with all the enthusiasm of a patient about to undergo triple Root Canals at the dentists', and explain to me how this charisma free, bland and weak voiced "actor" (he's the Tamil Kevin Costner) commands a formidable fan club and is dubbed, among other things, the "Ultimate Star".

I'd like to tell you that Nayanthara, fat and irritating in Ghajini, is now trim and svelte and pretty easy on the eye in a bikini, but that she unfortunately has to share screen time with a beached whale called Namitha.

Billa's biggest causalty is the complete dilution of the original's central concept of an ordinary streetwise man thrust into the high gloss and lethally treacherous world of international crime.

As cheesy as the original was (the multiple somersaults in the climax as each character makes a grab for an incriminating videotape is a sure cure for the Humour Challenged), Rajini's street performer, with betel juice dribbling down his chin, convinced you that even with swanky suits, gangster molls and hired underlings at his beck as Billa's double, nothing beat popping a paan and dancing a jig with his erstwhile cronies.

The current flick deals with the second Ajith's introduction and subsequent induction into a Police Officer's plan to impersonate Billa so perfunctorily you wonder why they even bothered with a song scene that was so skillfully inserted in the original (on the run from Billa's gang who discovers he's not the real deal, Rajini encounters his former friends, muses nostalgically on the simple life he once had, and then breaks into a song).

There's simply no context for the song in the remake. There is no delineation between the 2 roles (further damning evidence of Ajith's severely limited range), nothing to tell you that this is a streetwise pickpocket who'd rather dance in Batu Caves than throw lavish parties at his mansion.

There is an admirable economy in dialogue, a pleasant change from the often verbose fare that assails your ear in most Tamil flicks, and a courageous avoidance of anything even remotely resembling a romance between Nayanthara and Ajith, but a choppy approach to the screenplay makes it's relatively short (for a Tamil movie) running time of 2 hours seem at least 30 minutes longer. It tries to emulate the "Plot Twist" gimmick of the "Don" remake without daring to go the whole hog. So you're left with a weird hybrid that wants to stay true to the original, while jacking up the excitement via some modern plot twists, and failing miserably at both.

As an avid lover of movies (there's the word "flicks" after all in my blog title), I do tell myself every now and then not to limit my cine diet to Hollywood fare. And so I add variety to my viewing palate with a smattering of Chinese there, a grain of Korean here with side helpings of French, Spanish and Italian. To spice up the whole mixture, I should be heaping on generous portions of South Indian fare.

But on the basis of this latest foray into Tamil movies, I'll stick to the bland stuff. It's easier on the stomach....