There are cameras in the underwear of a gangster on his way to meeting his maker.
There is a camera in a box of sweets heading to its intended recipients, and another placed between a victim’s trunk-like legs. There are also cameras placed at the bottom of characters' feet, presumably to lend them a towering presence. Ab Tak Chhappan 2 is a drag, but at least playing spot-the-recording-equipment helps count down the time to the closing credits, which roll at the end of 106 pointless minutes.
Aejaz Gulab’s remake of Shimit Amin’s stylish 2004 encounter cop drama Ab Tak Chhappan is a tribute to the latter-day adventures of that movie’s producer, Ram Gopal Varma, and attempts to reignite interest in the cops-and-gangster dramas of the early 2000s. This sub-genre creatively re-imagined the headlines and fictionalised real battles, and thus died a natural death when the real-life dons perished or fled abroad. Now, the Dawood Ibrahim movie necessarily has to be set in Pakistan, where he is allegedly holed up (hence D-Day), or has to be an origins story (hence the mid-seventies set Once Upon a Time in Mumbaai).
Firing blanks
In Ab Tak Chhappan 2, nobody is keeping count of whether Sadhu Agashe (Nana Patekar) has surpassed his original body count of 56. Agashe, the incorruptible cop who goes beyond the call of duty to bump off an influential gangster in part one, is forced out of retirement by his former boss Pradhan (Mohan Agashe). He returns to a world that hasn’t changed since 2004. Eleven years after a Mumbai police encounter squad matched the city’s underworld bullet for bullet, the cops are still killing hoodlums rather than dragging them to court, the hoodlums are still ruled by influential bosses who are in cahoots with politicians, and innocents are falling through the cracks of the so-called System, one of Ram Gopal Varma’s favourite words (and abused in this movie beyond reasonable limits).
Shot and produced on the cheap, Ab Tak Chhappan 2 sees Patekar sleep-walking through one of his most iconic character roles, veterans such as Mohan Aghashe and Vikram Gokhale lining their retirement funds, and Gul Panag as an aggressive television reporter who converts a press conference into a shouting match. Her behaviour is as inexplicable as the rest of the movie.
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There is a camera in a box of sweets heading to its intended recipients, and another placed between a victim’s trunk-like legs. There are also cameras placed at the bottom of characters' feet, presumably to lend them a towering presence. Ab Tak Chhappan 2 is a drag, but at least playing spot-the-recording-equipment helps count down the time to the closing credits, which roll at the end of 106 pointless minutes.
Aejaz Gulab’s remake of Shimit Amin’s stylish 2004 encounter cop drama Ab Tak Chhappan is a tribute to the latter-day adventures of that movie’s producer, Ram Gopal Varma, and attempts to reignite interest in the cops-and-gangster dramas of the early 2000s. This sub-genre creatively re-imagined the headlines and fictionalised real battles, and thus died a natural death when the real-life dons perished or fled abroad. Now, the Dawood Ibrahim movie necessarily has to be set in Pakistan, where he is allegedly holed up (hence D-Day), or has to be an origins story (hence the mid-seventies set Once Upon a Time in Mumbaai).
Firing blanks
In Ab Tak Chhappan 2, nobody is keeping count of whether Sadhu Agashe (Nana Patekar) has surpassed his original body count of 56. Agashe, the incorruptible cop who goes beyond the call of duty to bump off an influential gangster in part one, is forced out of retirement by his former boss Pradhan (Mohan Agashe). He returns to a world that hasn’t changed since 2004. Eleven years after a Mumbai police encounter squad matched the city’s underworld bullet for bullet, the cops are still killing hoodlums rather than dragging them to court, the hoodlums are still ruled by influential bosses who are in cahoots with politicians, and innocents are falling through the cracks of the so-called System, one of Ram Gopal Varma’s favourite words (and abused in this movie beyond reasonable limits).
Shot and produced on the cheap, Ab Tak Chhappan 2 sees Patekar sleep-walking through one of his most iconic character roles, veterans such as Mohan Aghashe and Vikram Gokhale lining their retirement funds, and Gul Panag as an aggressive television reporter who converts a press conference into a shouting match. Her behaviour is as inexplicable as the rest of the movie.