As a (belated) introduction to Bollywood, Family turned out to be quite an astonishing eye-opener to 21st century Indian cinema. Gone are the days of identikit romance stories, endless song-and-dance numbers and surprisingly fat leading men. Today's product is just as likely to feature some edge-of-the-seat plotting and extreme violence, alongside the ageless singing and dancing naturally. With three of India's finest actors, leading man Akshay Kumar, newbie Aryeman Ramsey, and legend of the silver screen Amitabh Bachchan all present this is a film several notches deeper than traditional Bollywood output.
Running in at a hardly-short 2hrs 30mins Family is the story of just that, two families from opposite sides of the social and legal spectrum, who through one incident become permanently intwined in a tale of violence, revenge and bloodshed. The first act is quite different from the finale, with Akshay Kumar's nice-guy chef wooing his dream girl and saving his indolent younger brother from humiliation and occasional jailtime. Whilst once again attempting to save his brother and save his fathers honour he accidentally runs across Bachchan's Viren Sahi, India's most notorious and feared underworld boss. Whilst saving a number of innocent civilians from Sahi's murderous rampage Kumar is shot and killed, beginning a cycle of kidnapping, asthma attacks and threats of "I'll hack you!" from fat butchers.
Be under no illusions, this is quite a twisty moment. Until then the closest we'd come to blood was Kumar and Ramsey annihilating a group of extortionists in a surprisingly well-choreographed fight scene. There were indeed several incoherent song numbers prior to this, and a storyline that seemed to be about Kumar thinking his dream girl was a prostitute. His death, and then his brothers intense vengeance, comes as quite a jolt to the senses at this point.
While Family is probably not the best movie to ever have been released in Bombay it certainly doesn't fail in being exciting and well-executed. Amitabh Bachchan is one of the finest actors working in the world today, and this role, that of a ruthless gang boss, is quite a shift from his usual leading man roles (the man hosts Indian Who Wants to be a Millionaire for instance). He comes across as genuinely terrifying, and is quite a match for Ramsey's tortured Aryan Bhatia. That you genuinely do not know who will win, as Ramsey kidnaps Bachchan's estranged family, whilst repeatedly barely evading all attempts to catch and kill him, is a tribute to Shaktimaan's surprisingly deep script. Despite it's descent into murderous recrimination you never lose sight of the fact that at the heart of the movie are two families, with nothing in common except hatred for each other. And yet despite this they have a lot more in common than either could have imagined. As an introduction to Bollywood I would not suggest it, but as a great foreign film you can't really go wrong. |
