So has RGV got his mojo back? The jury is still out on that.
However, I found Veerappan much more watchable than any of his recent outings. Not for the gun shots, the axes and knives or the oozing blood; the protracted voiceover at the start to give us the back story; the interminable confrontations and chases through panoramic mountains, trenches and jungles; the pore-revealing extreme close-ups of actors (note the one in which a strand of hair accidentally gets into Lisa Ray’s mouth and poor Lisa has to chew on it while chewing on her lines).
Not even for the loud background score with a song that plays on Gulzar’s “jungle jungle baat chali hai pata chala hai”; the brutality heaped on humans and animals alike; the celebration of violence and certainly not for the romanticisation of a bandit king.
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Usha also stands out because she acts with her mind and soul, while the actress on the opposite end, Lisa, only lets her plumped-up lips do all the talking, that too with an odd, speeded-up cartoon-like touch. Quite a bit of the film is the tale of these two women. Wish it had remained so.
namrata joshi
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Veerappan
Genre: Biography
Director: Ram Gopal Varma
Cast: Lisa Ray, Sachiin J Joshi, Sandeep Bharadwaj
Storyline: The events that lead to a mission to capture and kill the notorious gangster Veerappan
Bottomline: The film’s life belongs to Muthulakshmi