Dhamaka: The latest bad Bollywood remake of a South Korean hit | Bollywood

It’s amazing but not surprising that Ram Madhvani managed to turn writer-director Kim Byung-woos, the stunning 2013 South Korean thriller The Terror Live, into a mediocre film.

In their misguided attempts to Indianize intelligent pulp fiction, Bollywood filmmakers and screenwriters have a habit of tempering the cynicism and gore of South Korean thrillers. They imbue the material with some of the worst trends in Bollywood cinema: fried sentimentality, turgid dialogue, and accentuation of each beat with background music that is generally unremarkable.

Pioneers of the trend are Sanjay Gupta, who remade Oldboy (2003) as Zinda (2006), and Mohit Suri, who has three South Korean remakes to his credit: A Bittersweet Life (2005) remade as Awarapan (2007), The Chaser (2008) remade as Murder 2 (2011) and I Saw The Devil (2010) remade as Ek Villain (2014).

Ram Madhvani, better director than Gupta and Suri, and co-writer Puneet Sharma, chose a film that is relatively easier to adapt. Set mostly in a news studio, The Terror Live follows a news anchor held hostage in his seat during a live broadcast as he is forced to negotiate with a man claiming to be a construction worker, who bombed a bridge he had helped build. He threatens to cause more damage if the president does not apologize to him for failing to compensate the families of his ex-colleagues who died while working on the bridge.

The story unfolds like a morality play in which the anchor must then choose between helping the man get his apologies – which would save lives but leave the government blushing – and stick to the briefing from his boss who would result in many deaths but bring a large number of viewers to the channel. The themes of the film and its pessimistic ending highlight the apathy of the government and the complicity of private news channels in the misadventures of politicians.

Spoilers for Dhamaka ahead.

When the first lockdown was announced amid the coronavirus pandemic last year in March and without warning, video footage of migrant workers traveling hundreds of miles home drew widespread criticism of the government’s mismanagement . The containment-related deaths of returning workers were widely reported, but the Union Ministry of Labor announced that since it had no record of migrant deaths, the issue of compensation did not arise. not.

In this political climate and with a simple plot at hand, Madhvani and Sharma had fertile ground on which to build Dhamaka. Their choice of architectural victim, the Bandra-Worli Sea Link in Mumbai, is smart.

But they drop the ball at first himself by mistreating a limited actor like Kartik Aaryan as anchor Arjun. Their worst mistake is to make the disgruntled construction worker want an apology from a certain Minister Patil, not the Prime Minister, the natural Indian equivalent of the President of South Korea. Apologies from a Patil are not enough for dhamaka, are they?

Read also : Dhamaka movie review: Kartik Aaryan 2.0 delivers intense performance in this gripping thriller

Other decisions that are tarnishing the life of what could have been a great movie are the aforementioned issues plaguing the South Korean-owned property’s previous Bollywood remakes.

Madhvani and Sharmas’ decision to exaggerate the themes of the films leads to a muscular dialogue about how selfish and predatory news channels are. The information about the news industry here is probably not new to Netflix audiences.

But Amruta Subhash frankly presents the boss of Arjuns as a pragmatic commander-in-chief who knows what’s at stake and how to maneuver it is top notch.