Rating:
★★
India. 2006.
Crew
Director/Producer – Sanjay Gupta, Screenplay – Sanjay Gupta & Suresh Nair, Dialogues – Kamlesh Pandey, Photography – Sanjay F. Gupta, Music – Vishal & Shekar, Background Score – Sonjoy Chowdhury, Visual Effects – Prime Focus Ltd. (Supervisor – Merzin Tavaria), Production Design – Nut Chimprasert, Meghna Gandhi & Shonali Gaikwad. Production Company – White Feather Films.
Cast
Sanjay Dutt (Balajit ‘Bala’ Roy), Lara Dutta (Jenny Singh), John Abraham (Rohit Chopra), Celina Jaitly (Nisha Roy). Mahesh Manjrekar (Joy Fernandes)
Plot
Balajit Roy is an Indian software manufacturer who has relocated to Bangkok with his wife Nisha. One day, Bala simply disappears from the jetty at the end of his property. He comes around in a tiny cell where he is kept prisoner for the next fourteen years. There he determines to train himself to fight so that he can take revenge on his captor. One day, he is simply released and left on a Bangkok rooftop. Aided by Indian taxi driver Jenny Singh, Bala sets out to find his captor and demand explanations about why he was imprisoned, brutalising and torturing everyone in his way. At the same time, his captor is monitoring him and taunts Bala to search deeper into his life for explanations.
Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy (2003) was a sensation when it came out, as much for its ultra-violence as it was for its Conceptual Breakthrough plot and outrageous twist ending. It made Park Chan-wook’s name and a decade later underwent a heavily disappointing English-language remake from Spike Lee with Oldboy (2013). In between, there was also this Bollywood-made unauthorised copy. Director Sanjay Gutpta is apparently insistent that this is not the case, a claim that one cannot take seriously given the extent to which Zinda frequently copies every single thing that Oldboy does.
Zinda copies Oldboy on just about every single point, even including the incest angle. About the only major difference is that the location has been moved to Bangkok ie. now it is also about a man trying to survive in a foreign country. The girl who comes to the protagonist’s aid and accompanies him is not chef but a taxi driver who is also Indian. The other major difference is the ending where Zinda drops the savagery of the fadeout where the protagonist tries to have his memories blanked through hypnosis and goes out with a more upbeat ending where he finds the bullied girl still alive. Aside from that, it is almost a scene-for-scene copy of Oldboy.
For all that, Zinda is unmemorable. First of all, Sanjay Gupta has toned the ultra-violence way down. Sanjay Dutt still wields power drills and a claw hammer but there are not the gut-churning scenes of seeing them in use. That only leaves seeing Sanjay Dutt take on gangs of thugs in hand-to-hand combat, which are competent but unremarkably choreographed scenes. There are no octopus-eating or tongue-severing scenes either.
The other disappointment is that Sanjay Dutt’s quest for revenge lacks the ferocity of Choi Min-sik’s performance in Oldboy. The driving sense of fierceness as he determines to find the answers to his mysteries is there but not something that pulses in the film’s essential lifeblood. Here the sense of shock at the Conceptual Breakthrough in the original is no more than the villain’s explaining their scheme that you get in a standard thriller.
Zinda plays out more like a Bollywood crime thriller. That said, many familiar Bollywood aspects – the song and dance numbers – are absent although the songs are still present on the soundtrack where the dvd even has links pop up telling you where you can text to download the song as a cellular ringtone. There is a surprising degree of on-screen eroticism and kissing for a Bollywood film.
Trailer here
