Movie review 'Broken Horses': Parinda, but flightless

Though there was some debate about whether it was Vidhu Vinod Chopra, Sanjay Leela Bhansali or Shekhar Kapoor, for me Gulshan Grover’s Steven Kapoor (in Ram Gopal Varma’s 1995 Rangeela) remains an abiding and succinct portrayal of Mr Chopra.

In one brief scene, Varma gave us the pretension and irritating overreach of the director. It was hysterical because it was so true. Pretentiousness should have been Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s first name because there's no pretension in his pretension. It's overt, misplaced and leaves you dumbfounded. So it figures that he has made a Hollywood film for Hollywood. Because, as Steven Kapoor said, “Mera competition idhar ke directors se nahi hai. Mera competition Coppola, Spielberg se hai.”

But Mr Coppola and Mr Spielberg can rest assured. In fact, if producer, writer, director Kanti Shah is worried for some reason, he can also take a chill pill. Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s Broken Horses threatens no one except Mr Chopra’s own reputation. Having remade his own film, Parinda, 26 years later, Mr Chopra should have made at least marginal improvement over his previous attempt. Alas! Broken Horses only makes you want to revisit the 1989 film that remains Chopra’s best film to date.

Broken Horse — a more pretentious title if you find I'll gift you my entire collection of Amitabh Bachchan posters — is Bollywood in English with white people, all of whom act like apne desi actors, channeling desi, filmy emotions.

The story is simple — it’s Rain Man meets Parinda with a generous dash of any and all "Bhai, Bhai" movies, Deewar onwards. The film is set near the Mexican border, on the American side, and begins 15 years ago.

Buddy, a boy, a brother, a son, is defined by two things — his love for his younger brother Jakey, and that fact that he is slow and simple.

A murder means that he has to not only take care of his younger brother, but is also called to settle scores by the evil Julius Hench (Vincent D’Onofrio). Buddy may be slow, but he is a sharpshooter. And he doesn’t flinch.

And there on, with the first assassination, his first assignment, the brothers take two different paths — Vijay and Ravi, Karan and Kishan, Buddy and Jakey.
Buddy becomes a gang member, providing for Jakey to learn to play the violin.

Fifteen years pass — Jakey (Jordi Caballero) is now a struggling violin player in New York, not a very good one going by the one performance we are privy to, and is planning to wed Vittoria. He hasn’t seen his brother for eight years, so wedding invitation is good reason to return home.

Meanwhile, back at home, in the dusty border town, Buddy (Chris Marquette) has devoted himself to constructing, bit by bit, the promise he once made to Jakey. He is also a very important member of Julius' gang.

Jakey arrives with the wedding invitation, Buddy says he'll leave the gang and move with him to New York and take care of his kids. But Julius can’t deal with disloyalty. He can't let people just walk away from him. A fire episode involving his family traumatises him a la Nana Patekar, but doesn't change him. A murder is planned that goes wrong. And there on starts the fight of one brother to save the other. Who saves him is a no-brainer.

Though the crossover of a Bollywood director into Hollywood territory is an interesting exercise to watch, Broken Horses is not just a B-grade film, it’s a bad B grade film. The first 10-15 minutes of the film are its worst. The scenes are contrived, the dialogue forced, and the acting so stilted and deliberate that the banality of it all made me cringe.

The first crucial scene and several conversations later in the film are so overwritten and coerced that it was a bit like watching a dance performance where the dancer is counting the steps loudly — one, two, three, four, one, two… There’s no rhythm in the conversations. It’s just hard, dead lines that have to be read out aloud by characters who are all defined by the stock roles assigned to them — good older brother, good younger brother, evil man, evil man’s henchman…

Just like no matter how much you enjoyed Slumdog Millionaire, there was a certain artificiality to the way the characters spoke and interacted. Same to same here. And what’s worse is that here desi sensibilities have been forced on these American people and relationships. Of course, basic emotions are universal, but each culture has its tempo and tenor that makes the interactions distinct. Here it’s all very Bollywood.

As the film progresses, there are some rather stunning scenes — but, sadly, only visually. Interactions remain awkward and almost all scenes are loopy, lopsided — if one actor is decent, the other is not; if one character’s dialogue is good, the other’s is terrible.

Though the film becomes slightly more interesting as action picks up and we are hurtling towards the climax, which is all very busy and violent, our interest remains in the immediate because it’s all leading to an oh-so-predictable end when it all comes back, like it always does, in the circle of life.

Chris Marquette was the only interesting actor because his Buddy was the only mildly developed character. The rest, poor things, were all killed before the film's action got to them. They were made dead by the director-writer's genre stereotyping.