Ab Tak Chhappan

I won’t do backflips selling this one, but Shimit Amin’s 2004 cop/crime drama is a strong genre piece, with a damn good central performance by Nana Patekar. Patekar’s Inspector is part of a unit whose primary function is assassination; big-shot members of Mumbai’s underworld are singled out, then Sadhu and his men collar them and essentially goad the criminals into resistance, setting up the thinnest rationale for gunning them down. (And, sometimes, skipping the rationale.) The plot involves a new superior trying to bump Sadhu off the force, a master criminal with whom Sadhu exchanges Michael-Mann-like taunting phone calls, and an inevitable shifting of fortunes. The central tension seems like it’s all in Sadhu–is he a good man doing bad things, or a bad man, period? But what I kind of liked–and this seems bound up in Patekar’s wound-up, low-bravado performance–is that we keep situating the character into genre frameworks, trying to make sense of him… but Sadhu eludes such simple categorizations.

The film drags a little, and no other actor is quite as good as Patekar, and… well, it’s not changing the world. But it’s a strong crime film, for those of us who are fans.

I couldn’t remember–Arnab, had you recommended this to me? I searched the site and saw nothing, so I may have come across it in my own time-wasting, netflix-queue-filling noodling about the web.