Review: HERO

To Know Despair, Watch This Movie

1/2 star

Mini Review:

When you watch this movie, you will slowly feel despair rise up from your gut as you feel terrible for an old favorite mutilated, for talentless star kids going through the motions of 'acting', for ageing stars who think their kids will bring back their lost fame, for an incestuous system of let's pat each other's derrieres which will produce duds like these. I despair for everyone! You will too.


Main Review:

  
Figure 1: The original Hero by Subhash Ghai
Figure 2: What time did to the VHS we carefully stored
Figure 3: What Nikhil Advani did to the old favorite...

You may not know Cecilia Gimenez. She meant well when she attempted to 'restore' the fresco. And the results are there for everyone to see. When you see Hero, you know Figure 3 is what the team behind the new Hero has done to original movie. And there was no one to stop them. In fact, Subhash Ghai is a part of this travesty. Somewhere, he too seems to be looking for that lost glory...

An old fresco means nothing to you? Then let me remind you of Sid, from Toy Story. Remember him? The kid who took perfectly innocent toys and turned them into mutants? 

Hero is a bit like that. The director added lots of tattoos, lots of flash, lots of noise, lots of leap in the air and come down like a ton of bricks fights. None of it believable. In fact, the tattoos make you laugh.

Imagine Kajol running away from Shah Rukh's embrace in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai when her ring blinks at her, reminding her she's engaged?

In Hero, every time the poor lad almost kisses Sunil Shetty... I mean... the heroine... you see 'Maa' tattooed right between his thumb and pointing finger... Quite the mood breaker that devotion to his mom...

But if they were paying attention to the story, the tattoo should have said 'baba', no? To prove his devotion to fair and lovely Amrish Puri wannabe? But who cares about the story! Pasha here should have been a fugitive from the law, but looks like a politician cum moneylender, and his attached-at-the-hip lawyer simply vanishes from the picture when the van blows up...

When does the van blow up, why is Pasha allowed to roam free are immaterial when you are rendered numb by the talentless lead pair pushing the story. Maybe that's harsh. How does a boy act when there's a fan in front of his face at every close up? (And there are a lot of them!) And what's a girl got to do when half the audience can see no more than her ginormous sulky lower lip, and the other half sees her as her dad with tresses? Not their fault at all. Their only fault is the horrendous dancing. Can imagine Matt Preston and co commenting on Masterchef Australia, 'I would have allowed it to remain two minutes less in the pan...' There is choreography, yes, but no elegance, no finesse.

That's it. There is no elegance, no finesse in the movie. Meenakshi Sheshadri may not have jazz danced in Paris but she made a better hostage. Jackie Shroff did not have to make that 'Hero wali entry' to make us believe that he was Dada... Dammit! Even the letter Amrish Puri receives from the chai and bread boy in jail in the original movie seems more authentic.

This movie is simply a despair inducing fake. 

I hope some day, Bollywood will stop patting each other on social media and IRL, stop grasping at straws in the hope that their kids will bring back the fame they once had, send their kids to school and give them an education instead of accents.

Salman Khan is trying real hard to be mister nice guy encouraging the next generation, but even he cannot succeed when the whole cocktail tastes like desperation.