Dabangg- A Movie Review

Cast: Salman Khan, Sonakshi Sinha, Arbaaz Khan, Sonu Sood, Vinod Khanna, Dimple Kapadia, Om Puri, Mahesh Manjrekar, Mahi Gill
Producer: Arbaaz Khan, Malaika Arora Khan, Dhillin Mehta
Director: Abhinav Kashyap
 Story: Dilip Shukla, Abhinav Kashyap
Music Director: Sajid, Wajid
Genre: Action comedy
Rating ***
Review: Birjis Adeni Rashed

This movie was made for certain target market and achieved in entertaining that focus audience well, hence became a blockbuster hit! The rest of the elite audiences who like a movie to intellectually appeal to the senses while entertaining them found this a little cheesy watch!

The movie had Salman Khan all over in his silly funny ways with his hip swinging, tongue in cheek dialogues and slapstick  comedy.  The action looks like desi Rajnikant meets Antonio Banderas in Desparodo, ducking bullets Matrix style! It also had yesteryears inspired ‘Angry Young Man Hero’ in goofy style ;)

 Though there is not much of a story, it’s a typical hackneyed story of a sibling rivalry taken advantage by a goon, and of course there is a heroine to add some oomph. Finally to this equation is the much hyped and talked about Mallika Arora's munni badnam …..zandu balm item song! Though the song is not on par with other popular item songs like beedi jalai le jigar me… it got free publicity from the Zandu Balm folks warning to sue them for uninformed inclusion of their product in a song!

The positives and negatives of the movie is its silliness, the point of view of course  changes with each viewer! There is not all nonsense in the movie though. There has been a serious thought and effort to leave  an open ended  climax and  unexplained dialogs for making a sequel.  Unexplained dialogs like why Rajjo/Sonakshi is called Arota by her father, which  she doesn’t explain and  wants it  to be  uncovered by Chulbul/Salman could be a lead to another angle of a story!

Salman khan has aged and grown out of shape, though suitable for the role of an Indian cop. His acting or overacting is meant to entertain which it does!  Experienced actors like Dimple Kapadia and Vinod Khanna are wasted in small roles. The debutante Sonakshi Sinha, Shatrugan Sinha’s daughter surprisingly a Reena Roy look-alike performs well and apparently is having a beeline of movies.

Dabang is apparently  successful and beating box-office records,  the  plain logic could be:-Timing- the timing of the release was right, a release on Eid, after Ramadan where people flock to theatres is bound to get major first day record sales ;) ; Niche market- In the recent past most movies have been either made for elite thinking audiences, urban audiences or the expat NRI’s , hence this movie catering to the local common man/ aam admi  of the heavily populated India  grabbed that niche market.   ….. whatever the reason, this  movie isn’t about sense! It’s senseless.