SATYA 2: review

Half A Star

Funniest Gangster Film

Mini Review:

Spend two hours and thirty three minutes of your life vacillating between despair (because it isn’t anything like the original Satya) and unintentional humor from the verbal and visual vomit on the screen.

Main Review:

Such a relief that this was not anything like the original Satya. This is perhaps the funniest gangster film this year. Which other film dares to claim that it was inspired by Tom And Jerry cartoons? The gangsters actually discuss this:

‘Tom and Jerry dekha hai? Choohe aur billi ki ladai mein faayda hamesha kutte ka hota hai!’

Of course immediately after, the guy who wears maximum jewellery and overacts the most dies.

Well, these are gangsters. And our hero is creating a company with a structure that promises you an India within India, a business within all businesses, a system (pronounced ‘systim’ so many times, you will forget the original enunciation) within systems… His plan is so complex, it foxes the cops, and the filmmaker too (‘what his system is we will tell you that another time...’ they promise)

The hero wears sweaters in Bombay. As if that wasn’t an indication of his poor constitution, you discover that he is not even half Mohit Ahlawat. He has no oglable anything. No gluteus maximus, no strong legs, no six-pack abs, and no acting. You wish he'd bathe once in a while, though. Ram Gopal Varma claimed that he ‘acts with his eyes and screams with his whispers’ so we waited two and a half hours for that to happen…

The heroines… Yes, there are two. Equally jaw-droppingly hilarious. ‘My name is Special’ one says, ‘Who are you?’ lying down on the floor, her breasts heaving (her boyfriend actually wrestles her to the ground in order to make her stop her fake ballet type dance). The audience wants to offer a towel to wipe her sweaty cleavage (which we see all through the movie), but we are distracted by the second heroine: Duckface.

She’s poor man’s Nargis Fahkri, this Satya’s love interest. She has the funniest dance moves this side of Bollywood dance studios. She’s supposed to be the village belle fantasy, but the only thing she might ever do is cure men of amorous thoughts. She’s singing something apparently lustful as she comes at the hero on all fours, and all we want to do is sign her up for the local kindergarten where she can play 'horsie' with toddlers. She overdoes the bite-lower-lip-wide-eyed act so much that you pray a stray bullet should kill her.

When we speak about bullets, we must speak about cops. The cops in the movie (and there are many) are very fond of drawing guns, even on unarmed, wide-eyed belles (dressed so skimpily, she could not possibly hide her gun anywhere, and if at all, she wouldn’t be able to draw that gun quickly enough). If that wasn’t funny, the main cop is shown to clutch his back in agony and groan in pain in every scene and with every step he takes. Aargh! Uff! Aaargh! Ohhh!

But there’s another who overacts. His speech about how there’s a ‘soya hua puliswala jo jaagrut ho gaya’ is so convoluted and so badly delivered, it is worth two bullets. One for your own head (for trying to decipher this: when you came to me I was a cop who was tired of being a cop, and in that frustration I agreed to not be a cop, but the cop inside me was awakened and when a cop becomes a cop inside and out, then you must understand that an awakened cop is more than just a cop and he has to behave as though he was awakened…), and one for his trouble.

For those who love tear-your-shirt, kickass, dhaansu one liners, this movie is a feast of untranslatable laughs:

‘In sab ke badle mein milega aapko badla!’

‘Daddy, woh baharwala hai, use baahar hi rakho, daddy!’

‘Satya, yeh koi double role film nahi hai.’

‘Aur media baron Gurdeep Rajdesai ki maut bhi hogi.’

‘Company kaam aur paisa aisa banati jaaye ki kisi ko bhi pata na chale.’

‘Jo anyay kare, use nyay se maaro!’

Thankfully, there are no crotch shots, peek under the skirt shots, no look into cleavage shots, make audience dizzy with sudden dive shots, no snatch and jerk shots to make you want to chew your fingers off. But there’s eagle-vision camera (a camera that floats over Bombay) offering the audience a bird’s eye-view of the underworld that is Bombay. And that eagle-vision camera earns this movie the half star.

Thankfully, this is nothing like the original Satya, which is still a blueprint for many a crime movie almost 25 years later. 

As for the rest of the movie, if you’re not laughing at the convoluted dialog, then you must start a drinking game. Each time the voiceover (has more lines than all the characters in the movie) says ‘Underworld’ you drink. You’ll be drunk within the first ten minutes.

(our site www.filmorbit.com is still struggling with crazy server issues. please read review here.)