Gunday

Gunday (English: Outlaws or Goons) is a 2014 Indian action crime thriller film written and directed by Ali Abbas Zafarand produced by Aditya Chopra. The film featured Ranveer Singh and Arjun Kapoor in the lead roles with Priyanka Chopra and Irrfan Khan in supporting roles.The film starts off in the 1970s, with a young Bikram and Bala, who become gun carriers and coal bandits. They ultimately grow up to become the most powerful goons of Calcutta. The film was released on 14 February 2014.
The film also released in Bengali with a full Bengali soundtrack also composed by Sohail Sen. Though, in some of theBengali songs, the singers differ from the original. This will also be the first Indian film to have its trailer premiere at theDubai International Film Festival
There is a place, in popular film, for a genre piece that plays exactly according to the established template for that genre as a means of highlighting skillful execution. "Gunday" is a fine example. Its gangland saga narrative isn't a particularly novel one, with its morally ambiguous cops and love triangles and so forth. As a '70s throwback it's definitely not alone in recent years. And yet "Gunday" is a thunderously entertaining movie, which is down to its cast and director.

The storyline is the element that owes the most to the macho masala pictures of the 1980s, centering as it does upon two oppressed refugees from the Indo-Pakistan War of 1971 who become friends for life. By the dawn of the ’80s, they’ve clawed their way to alpha-dog status as Calcutta’s top gunday, a term that can mean “hoodlums” or “bullies,” but is translated as “outlaws” in the film’s subtitles. Our anti-heroic protagonists are classic poor-boy outcasts who pursue the only opportunities available to them, rising through sheer resourcefulness to become the gaudy rulers of the city’s underworld. Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in America” is only one of the obvious antecedents that spring to mind.

“Gunday” is a period piece, but it is first and foremost a mainstream commercial movie aimed at the biggest possible modern-day audience. It isn’t a fanboy pastiche of the genre movies it refers to; in fact, there’s some evidence that the filmmakers have gone out of there way to avoid even the appearance of geekiness. The film has been skillfully realized as a commercial entertainment on a huge scale, and it is often surprisingly beautiful, especially in the sequences shot on location in the West Bengal capital of Calcutta, a novel setting for the Mumbai-based Hindi movie industry.

A light wash of ’80s style for the costumes and hair styles  (wide lapels here, allusions to bellbottoms there) offsets the washboard abs and flowing manes (dreamy in slow-motion) of the film’s muscular young co-stars. The pals are distinguished by familiar broad-stroke character traits — Bala (Arjun Kapoor) is a hothead, Bikram (Ranveer Singh) a self-controlled pragmatist. From that dichotomy, most of the major plot turns can be extrapolated, and by the time the pic introduces its third major character, slinky cabaret dancer Nandita (Priyanka Chopra), and both Bala and Bikram take a shine to her, the outcome is all but written in stone.
The film’s first half is boisterous and light-hearted, charting Bala and Bikram’s rise to power and the giddy initial phase of their infatuation with Nandita. Rather less effective is the more serious second half, which is never as dark and intense as it should be to achieve the desired emotional payoff. Some of this must be laid at the feet of the hard-working but ultimately slightly dull Kapoor; in genre terms, Bala is the tumultuous “angry young man” figure, a role that an inspired actor like the young Shah Rukh Khan would have used pilfer the entire movie. (Amitabh Bachchan did it, in several movies, with just a single passionate soliloquy.) Kapoor puts a lot of energy into capturing the sinew-straining outward signs of Balu’s turmoil, but he never makes us feel the anguish truly runs deep. Reaching for the full effect, director Zafar resorts to dying Kapoor’s face a demonic bright red during a pivotal Holi celebration.

What makes “Gunday” work and pulls us along is the great skill and obvious affection with which these familiar elements have been  deployed. This could be, in part, because the film is flagged as a tribute to the late Yash Raj founder, Yash Chopra, who directed several of the best masala films, including 1975′s “Deewaar,” 1978′s “Trishul” and, perhaps most significantly, 1979′s “Kaala Patthar,” a melodrama whose disgraced hero (Bachchan) redeems himself by working in a coal mine.

Coal is a defining metaphor in “Gunday,” too, a substance that soils the characters’ hands and faces and marks them as members of the underclass, and that they doubt can ever be washed off.  A lovingly detailed interior set depicting the coal mine run by Bala and Bikram reps a dark and dusty triumph for production designer Rajat Poddar, dominated by an enormous metal digging machine. During the whole length of the fight staged here, one anticipates the lethal corkscrewing of at least one baddie, a promise that is duly fulfilled. When a movie goes full Bollywood, as “Gunday” so enthusiastically does, it would never settle for a mere gun over an ordinary fireplace: Bigger, bolder and louder is always better.