Gabbar Is Back: Old Bottle New Wine

Well as the name suggests “Gabbar Is Back” is your quintessential Bollywood action pot boiler albeit with a slight freshness in the presentation.

After the critically acclaimed “Baby”, Akshay Kumar is back playing what he is best at, an action hero who punches the goons, does somersaults and kicks in flying motion, in short our own Bollywood masala hero.

“Gabbar Is Back” is the remake of 2002 tamil hit “Ramanna” Directed & Written by A R Murugadoss. A R Murugadoss’s story does not have any new plot to offer, what with our lead Aditya (Akshay Kumar) plays soft hearted crusader who fights against corruption and punishes corrupt Govt. official with a pseudo name “Gabbar”.

The story & screenplay is extremely predictable, but there has been an effort with additional screenplay by Rajat Arora to make the screenplay more contemporary and to add flavor of Bollywood. A few sequences like hospital sequence or the initial kidnapping sequences makes the movie impactful in the first half but the freshness and nuance factor fades away in the second half. More cardboard characters are introduced including the arch typical villain Digvijay Patil (Suman Talwar). Especially the climax becomes too preachy.

Dialogues by Rajat Arora have nothing new to offer and sounds too pompous and extremely over the top.
It is the performance of Akshay Kumar as Aditya a.k.a “Gabbar” which binds the movie. Akshay is extremely comfortable playing the character and looks at ease which adds to the overall impact of the character. Shruti Hasan has a very brief role of a typical chirpy girl which she tries hard to make it look convincing and is successful to some extent. Suman Talwar as Digvijay Patil plays the arch typical villain with flaring nostrils and angry face, in nut shell nothing new. Jaideep Ahlawat as the CBI inspector Kuldeep Pahwa hams incessantly and literally shouts his dialogues. Sunil Grover as Sadhuram puts an honest effort and gives us a convincing performance. Not much to be said of the rest of the cast.

Krish ,the debutant director in Hindi films who is big name of Telugu movies, fails to do complete justice and the stale story & screenplay did not help as well. Where Krish scores is in the overall presentation which has a slight freshness….

The rest of the technical team does not impress too much….Even the production value is low considering the movie coming from Bhansali Productions which is known for its opulent production value…

If you are a diehard Akshay Kumar fan then you may like the movie, others please wait for the television premiere…I will go with Two & a Half Star….

Movie Rating: (2.5 / 5)