Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
No reviews of Bollywood movies for 2009 would be complete without a mention of Kaminey. Shahid Kapoor is in a double role (why is this so endemic to Bollywood?) as Guddu – the simple folk in love with the minister’s daughter Sweety (Priyanka Chopra) and Charlie – a man at home in a life of crime. Oh, and Guddu and Charlie are identical twins. But this movie is not about the inevitable and hackneyed faux pas that ensue between the brothers (and Bollywood has so much of that that that could emerge as a genre in itself). This is a movie about the sheer nature of people, and Vishal Bhardwaj’s (Maqbool, Omkara) triumph is about showing that people – or most – are inherently rotten out and out, and the movie leaves this message without a twinge of cynicism. Where Kaminey strikes out on its own it strikes a chord – it fails wherever it attempts a Tarantino – the kill ‘em all shootout for example does not click, by a mile
13.5/20
