Post by magicmikassa on Feb 17, 2009 15:58:26 GMT -5
This movie is a remake/ripoff of an 80's action movie from America, but it's not the one your thinking of! No, this is not a remake (or ripoff if you prefer) of the Schwarzenegger classic, but rather the Michael Dudikoff classic American Ninja!
Yeah, so basically the plot of this film is taken directly from American Ninja. What I found interesting in this film is that whenever the ninjas appear on screen part of the Star Wars soundtrack plays. It starts off with the first appearance of the ninjas being accompanied by the Imperial March and then each subsequent appearance features more Star Wars music such as the music from the Battle of Yavin. As the movie progresses the Star Wars music increases to not only ninja scenes, but bad guy scenes in general. Then by the end of the movie the Star Wars music is simply used in every single scene! At first I was thinking India must equate Star Wars with all things evil, but by the end I started to realize that they probably understand as well as I do that movie scores don't get better than Star Wars so their theory must have been why even try?
The movie also utilizes music from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly in at least one scene. The only reason I could see for them using the music is that the character on screen could be described as an "Ugly" character, both in his persona and his appearance.
There is also a song in one scene that combines "Col. Bogeys March" from The Bridge on the River Kwai with the theme to Shaft. Yup.
The action at the end switches from American Ninja to the Clint Eastwood classic Where Eagles Dare with a snowy mountain base and some mountain trolley action.
Of course this being a Bollywood movie there are also some musical numbers. The very first scene of the movie is a Rocky style training montage! A bit odd to start the movie with as this usually comes in the middle, but I guess this movie just wanted to get right to the good stuff! Later in the movie comes the full on singing and dancing musical numbers which are fun to see if you are someone like me who can tolerate these sorts of things.
Overall, the movie is a pretty good translation of American Ninja to the Bollywood scene with a little Where Eagles Dare to top it all off. It's not as good as American Ninja or Where Eagles Dare mind you, but for a fun musical Indian version it does the job. It really should have been called Indian (or Bollywood) Ninja in my opinion, but then I guess they couldn't have had the theme song with the rousing chorus of "Comaaaandooooooooooo! Comaanddoooooooooo!" and who would want to deprive the movie of that?!