Writer: K. C. Bokadia
Director: K. C. Bokadia
Cast: Naseeruddin Shah, Mallika Sherawat, Jackie Shroff, Anupam Kher, Om Puri, Rahul Solanki, Ashutosh Rana, Rajpal Yadav, Sushant Singh, Govind Namdev, and Charu Sharma
Release Dates: March 06, 2015
Review written sometime in March 2015
We walked in half an hour late, but that did not quite matter. A Hindi movie is always very accommodating. It allows you to follow its plot from almost any point in its running time. And Dirty Politics is no different.
The Plot
The film revolves around the disappearance of a sexy rambunctious dancer: Anokhi Devi (Mallika Sherawat). Anokhi rises from a lowly village girl to a reputed artist thanks to her sexual adventures with a minister (Om Puri). Both have their fill of sex and money until Anokhi decides she wants to stand for elections from the same constituency as the minister's friend (Jackie Shroff). Now this friend is privy to some of the worst secrets of the minister. So, true to the spirit of a crafty politician, the minister promises Anokhi the ticket and the very next second, promptly announces his friend to be candidate for that constituency.
Naturally then, Anokhi turns into a viper. She blackmails the minister with a film that has her and his erotic exploits. And all of a sudden, she gets wiped out. A social activist (Naseeruddin Shah) picks up the scent of her murder and causes enough of a ruckus for the case to be handed over to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). How the CBI officer (Anupam Kher) and his sidekicks (Atul Kulkarni and Sushant Singh) solve the case is, more or less, what the rest of the film is about.
Camera and Action!
The movie will have fit well onto the small screen. The lingering shots of faces contorted and torn between wanting to emote and not knowing what to do are stuff popular Indian TV serials are made of. This movie has them all - slow turns, slow smiles, slow twirling of moustaches, slow everything! All that aside, someone in the action-and-stunts department decided to throw in a huge helping of Singham-style fights. So police officers run pell-mell at 180 kms/hour to catch criminals, and the moment the criminals are caught by their collars, the film slows down everything to 0.8 metres/second. Now there are a lot many culprits to catch and so this sprint-and-freeze happens a bit too frequently for your patience. You will have forgiven them were the fights and chases to be choreographed well. But no such miracle occurs. The fights look like flashbacks of each other, and the kicks land more or less where the kicks of the previous fighters did.
Script and Dialogues
The script writers decided to not work a lot on the plot. And so, the goings-on move only among three to four locations specifically: The minister's house, the chief minister's house, Mallika Sherawat's house, and a few alleys and town squares - all studio shots of course. The economy in the writing shows up in the scenes: The maximum number of people having a conversation in any given scene is three and nearly all are either played in the hall, the bedroom, the courtyard, the police station, and the customary dark lanes of which even crime might have tired of.
As for the dialogues, from start to finish, they are all sprinkled with a heavy dose of 'Greek and Latin'. Naseeruddin Shah inaugurates the badmouthing with badwa (which means pimp) and thereafter, Mallika and Om Puri unzip nearly all their lines with superlatives such as chutiya, gandu, and kutiya. Mallika goes so far as to compare men to prostitutes while Om Puri rhetorically asks her secretary (a clueless Rajpal Yadav): "Is she sleeping around for the first time? Hasn't she had sex before?" And speaking of sex, there's no shortage of it in this caper.
Om Puri has a lot of it - with Mallika. What begins as a third-rate advertisement for Mallika's ability to carry off, and do away with, sarees descends into the best worst sex scene ever to have been part of Bollywood masalas. Om Puri shows he has all the ability to be a daddy of a porn star. He lechs, leers, bites into Mallika's shoulders, allows his nose to run helter skelter between her cleavage and also cannot quite shoo his hands off her breasts. Well, it does read like the script from a porn movie but I am sure even porn has better production values these days. This one had set out to redefine the benchmark for decrepit eyesores.
The Talent - or The Waste of It!
Dirty Politics seems to have lured the best talent in the industry and made them do a hack job on purpose:
So, What About It?
Well, the film itself isn't tough enough to depart from the mundane either. Yes, it is based on the Bhanvari Devi scandal and does try to whip up a frothy take on the politics in Northern India. However, unnecessary masala buffers bloat it away from what it tries to narrate. The overtly dramatic exasperating close-ups, the slow motion entries of cars, and the needless sex scenes could have been snipped. Mallika's unintentionally hilarious crossing and uncrossing of Mallika's legs - (which she decided to keep fully clothed) could have been done away with as well. And the ending could have done itself a favour by being a lot less stupid! Well, I have seen films with endings fit enough to be worse than the contents of a garbage can. This one though rewrites the usual rotten standards of idiocy and drags them to new lows!
Which - ultimately - is what Dirty Politics is all about. Of course, I do not recommend it. But you may want to take a look and wonder how this gutter bubbling over with absolute filth managed to slip past the scissors of the censor board.
*Images courtesy of: B.M.B Music & Magnetics Ltd and Zee Music
Director: K. C. Bokadia
Cast: Naseeruddin Shah, Mallika Sherawat, Jackie Shroff, Anupam Kher, Om Puri, Rahul Solanki, Ashutosh Rana, Rajpal Yadav, Sushant Singh, Govind Namdev, and Charu Sharma
Release Dates: March 06, 2015
Review written sometime in March 2015
We walked in half an hour late, but that did not quite matter. A Hindi movie is always very accommodating. It allows you to follow its plot from almost any point in its running time. And Dirty Politics is no different.
 |
| *Dirty Politics: A corrupt screenplay and a waste of talent are its highlights. |
The film revolves around the disappearance of a sexy rambunctious dancer: Anokhi Devi (Mallika Sherawat). Anokhi rises from a lowly village girl to a reputed artist thanks to her sexual adventures with a minister (Om Puri). Both have their fill of sex and money until Anokhi decides she wants to stand for elections from the same constituency as the minister's friend (Jackie Shroff). Now this friend is privy to some of the worst secrets of the minister. So, true to the spirit of a crafty politician, the minister promises Anokhi the ticket and the very next second, promptly announces his friend to be candidate for that constituency.
Naturally then, Anokhi turns into a viper. She blackmails the minister with a film that has her and his erotic exploits. And all of a sudden, she gets wiped out. A social activist (Naseeruddin Shah) picks up the scent of her murder and causes enough of a ruckus for the case to be handed over to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). How the CBI officer (Anupam Kher) and his sidekicks (Atul Kulkarni and Sushant Singh) solve the case is, more or less, what the rest of the film is about.
Camera and Action!
The movie will have fit well onto the small screen. The lingering shots of faces contorted and torn between wanting to emote and not knowing what to do are stuff popular Indian TV serials are made of. This movie has them all - slow turns, slow smiles, slow twirling of moustaches, slow everything! All that aside, someone in the action-and-stunts department decided to throw in a huge helping of Singham-style fights. So police officers run pell-mell at 180 kms/hour to catch criminals, and the moment the criminals are caught by their collars, the film slows down everything to 0.8 metres/second. Now there are a lot many culprits to catch and so this sprint-and-freeze happens a bit too frequently for your patience. You will have forgiven them were the fights and chases to be choreographed well. But no such miracle occurs. The fights look like flashbacks of each other, and the kicks land more or less where the kicks of the previous fighters did.
 |
| *Mallika Sherawat: "People, thank God for sex! Else, I wouldn't be an actress!" |
The script writers decided to not work a lot on the plot. And so, the goings-on move only among three to four locations specifically: The minister's house, the chief minister's house, Mallika Sherawat's house, and a few alleys and town squares - all studio shots of course. The economy in the writing shows up in the scenes: The maximum number of people having a conversation in any given scene is three and nearly all are either played in the hall, the bedroom, the courtyard, the police station, and the customary dark lanes of which even crime might have tired of.
As for the dialogues, from start to finish, they are all sprinkled with a heavy dose of 'Greek and Latin'. Naseeruddin Shah inaugurates the badmouthing with badwa (which means pimp) and thereafter, Mallika and Om Puri unzip nearly all their lines with superlatives such as chutiya, gandu, and kutiya. Mallika goes so far as to compare men to prostitutes while Om Puri rhetorically asks her secretary (a clueless Rajpal Yadav): "Is she sleeping around for the first time? Hasn't she had sex before?" And speaking of sex, there's no shortage of it in this caper.
 |
| *Om Puri and Mallika Sherawat: All you wanted to know about insipid sex and did not know whom to ask! |
The Talent - or The Waste of It!
Dirty Politics seems to have lured the best talent in the industry and made them do a hack job on purpose:
 |
| *Naseeruddin Shah: "Yes, I work for money! Why do you think I am here!" |
- Om Puri must have sleepwalked through his act. He has done this so many times that I think they could have used footage of his previous roles from the film archives and saved on his fees.
- Ashutosh Rana, as the minister's friend and sidekick, merely twirls his moustache, looks his evil self, and pretty much gets lost in the sea of hair and goggles.
- Mallika may not be the best talent but she sure knows to display her self. That she does here and in the bargain puts in no effort to emote and act! Consequently, she has just one bland face on even when it comes to crying over her miseries or regretting her actions.
- Naseeruddin Shah is of no use here. His role serves virtually no purpose other than to link one weak scene to the other. And inevitably, the script disposes him off before you notice him a bit too much for his own reputation.
- Neither is Jackie Shroff as the eyeliner-loving politician. He tries his best to look mean
*Jackie Shroff: "Of course, I am annoyed! I was a Hero once!
And now? I have to use eyeliners!"and make me scared. But the naivety of his act and the studio sets in which the crime is staged take away even the slightest whiff of scare that may have approached me. - Anupam Kher plays the upright CBI officer. You can see shades of his character in Saaransh and the mannerisms of a myriad other roles that required him to played police officers. There's the sincerity and the stoic calm to his act, but it's not as if that's something of a surprise.
- As for Atul Kulkarni and Sushant Singh, it would have been better had they not agree to make this:
- Sushant looks too stupid to be taken seriously: His eyebrows overshadow his histrionics and that ridiculous paintbrush of a moustache occupies so much of screen space, you wonder why wasn't he arrested for that absurdity.
- Atul tries hard - very hard - to act like Ajay Devgun in Singham. He looks tough, shakes and wiggles his head like a tough guy, and gets angry like a tough guy. Just that it ends up looking like he wants to be a tough guy and not that he is a tough guy!
 |
| *The cast: "We don't know about Mallika but we got duped!" |
Well, the film itself isn't tough enough to depart from the mundane either. Yes, it is based on the Bhanvari Devi scandal and does try to whip up a frothy take on the politics in Northern India. However, unnecessary masala buffers bloat it away from what it tries to narrate. The overtly dramatic exasperating close-ups, the slow motion entries of cars, and the needless sex scenes could have been snipped. Mallika's unintentionally hilarious crossing and uncrossing of Mallika's legs - (which she decided to keep fully clothed) could have been done away with as well. And the ending could have done itself a favour by being a lot less stupid! Well, I have seen films with endings fit enough to be worse than the contents of a garbage can. This one though rewrites the usual rotten standards of idiocy and drags them to new lows!
Which - ultimately - is what Dirty Politics is all about. Of course, I do not recommend it. But you may want to take a look and wonder how this gutter bubbling over with absolute filth managed to slip past the scissors of the censor board.
*Images courtesy of: B.M.B Music & Magnetics Ltd and Zee Music
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