There used to be a time when I used to think that remakes are child’s play. You never needed too much effort for remaking AKA stealing someone else’s idea. The reason that I thought the likes of Satish Kaushik, Sanjay Gupta, Vikram Bhat and our very own Vijay and Jayam Ravi made easy money selling an idea what others had whacked their brains over. All that changed overnight. Now I think remakes are no joke. To make a film, no matter how bad (you know the likes of Hum aapke dil mein rehte hain and priyamana thozhi); and to make it appealing to the audience, is a challenging job in itself. Because even if you are going to do an E-adichan copy of the original, chances are, the product could look way too bad compared to the original. Now Zinda, Kante, even Ek Ajnabee sit among great remake classics….All that after watching RGV’s Aag!
If I had to describe Aag in one word, several spring up in my mind…Aiyo tops the list, closely followed by yuck, disastrous, disgraceful, sucks et al.
The movie looks like it has been ghost directed by some B grade movie maker and they just happened to use RGV’s name (like someone suggested!). Looks like a foray by the Ramsay brothers into mainstream cinema, staring the living for a change! The remake of one of my favorite movies of all time does not work on so many levels.

1. Scenes are painfully long, with a background that is simply put dull and too slow. In fact the only thing slower than the score is the movie’s pace (perhaps the result of the score?) and Amitabh’s hacking off of Mohanlal’s fingers! (the only decent and truly chilling moment in the movie. C’mon this doesn’t need a spoiler alert…every one knows Thakur gave Gabbar his ‘haath’!)

2. The life of Sholay lay primarily in 2 characters. One Gabbar. Another Jai. Amitabh tries hard to make a good gabba(e)r, but the character’s scenes are so badly written and unnecessarily stretched, ‘Hindi Cinema’s most scary villain’ ends up being awfully boring. The vulnerability angle of a sibling and a limping leg are unwanted deviations from the oh-so-demonic Gabbar Singh we are familiar with. As for Jai…well there was no Jai in the movie! His ultra cool, smart talking character is replaced by a half baked Raj Ranade sporting a wig inspired by the centershock ad, with no wit (or sense whatsoever) and uses a line like ‘I respect you so much’ for a pick up line! Yawn!

3. My only complaint with Sholay, Basanti’s bak bak could have been mercifully chopped shorter. But Aag’s Ghungroo is even more disastrous, owing to the fact that she tends to at times play the let-me-explain-you-what’s-going on stuff. I’ll clarify what this means in my next point

4. Okay, may be I shouldn’t be comparing both films and review Aag as an RGV movie. But I cant because there’s no RGV anywhere in Aag! The man’s way of story telling is just not to be seen. Certain scenes in Aag have been elaborately explained out to the audience as if we are dumb enough not to get a subtle enactment. Like the way Ghungroo explains Sushmita Sen’s Devi (and thereby the audience) that she is in love with Raj. Isn’t that obvious? Or may be not as there weren’t enough sequences to establish that chemistry as the original did with just 2 shots of AB and Jaya. That was poetry! And again we have Ghungroo (think she played some sort of narrator) explaining the blind man the whole story of how his son got killed. The original has none of that rigmarole and has Dharmendra’s Veero leading Imam Sahib to his son’s body; not a word spoken! And of course, Raj’s worst-pcik-up-line in Indian Cinema, which wants to tell the audience that the hero respects the heroine, the heroine is a lonely widow, the heroine runs a clinic and has a caring tender heart all at one go. *barf*. Even without looking at Sholay, RGV’s previous works as well had many such instances where there was no need for a word or even a visual to show a major turning point in the story. The killing of the Elder Bother (KK (killer) Menon) in Sarkar comes to my mind. Whatever happened?

5. I remember every line spoken by Jai, Thakur and most importantly Gabbar from the original. I’d rather forget every line spoken on screen in Aag

6. Even a film like Nishabd had it’s fair share of well directed scenes, the one where Jia runs out of the room after declaring her love for the old man, with a picture of the man’s wife hanging on the wall right beside the door. Good! But Aag simply has none. It looked like RGV desperately wanted to make a movie that was a masala entertainer and swayed so much away from his own style. Wish he had understood the simple truth. When you remake the film, make it the way you would make it in your style, with your signature. Please get some lessons from Farhan Akhtar.

7. Talking about signature, the only good thing about the film is the Mehbooba song feat. RGV favorite Urmila. The only song that holds good for the remake definition (unwated gyan I know!) I stated above. All other songs fall flat, but hey, so did the original one’s songs too. Finally Aag agrees with Sholay on one point!

8. The factor that worked bigtime for Sholay, the fast pace of the narrative, is simply missing in Aag. What a poor screenplay can do to even the most celebrated of stories

9. I wished Mohanlal spoke Malayalam rather than ‘Hindi’ in the movie. Didn’t sound very different you know!

Bottom line; Aag is how not to remake a movie, let alone a cult classic!
I had to watch ek challis ki last local (dark, funny, cynical, violent, awesome) and Sholay to cure the burns I got after ‘Aag’ :)

P.S: What’s with another Bachan making a special appearance on one Bachan’s movie? Ek lo ek muft? We have Big B in spl appearance in almost all of Junior B’s movies and vice versa. I am afraid there would soon have Ash B (bhi) added to that list. Yuck!

Updated...included a cool toon I came across

Song on: none
Mood: Monday morning blues