Shot in Los Angeles, but Bombay All the Way
By DAVE KEHR
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/20/movies/20KAAN.html

A delirious Bollywood reimagining of "Reservoir Dogs," complete with
musical numbers, Sanjay Gupta's "Kaante" shifts as fluidly between
cinematic idioms as it does between Hindi and English. Shot in Los
Angeles with a largely American technical crew, Mr. Gupta's film,
which opens today in the New York metropolitan area and Toronto,
offers the fulsome sentimentality of Indian melodrama at one moment
and the bloody, absurdly overscale violence of a Hollywood action
film at the next.

No points for originality will be awarded to Mr. Gupta's screenplay
about six Indian hoodlums who band together to rob the downtown bank
favored by the members of the Los Angeles Police Department. (The
theory is that the bank will have light security, given the
terrifying reputation of its depositors.)

The six men range in type from the natty, dignified Major (Amitabh
Bachchan), a disgraced military veteran who participates in the
robbery to raise the money to return his dying wife to India, to the
screamingly psychotic yet oddly lovable Baali (Mahesh Manjrekar), a
drug-addled killer with bleached blond hair and a bad stutter, whose
motive is a retarded sister who needs looking after.

Strangely like their predecessors in "Reservoir Dogs," the six men
spend much of their time sitting around restaurant tables engaged in
intense discussions about nothing in particular. They also enjoy
putting on sunglasses and dark suits and walking shoulder to shoulder
toward the camera in rapturous slow motion.

Unlike "Reservoir Dogs," "Kaante" actually depicts the robbery, a
messy affair in which the Dhogs, armed with automatic weapons
hijacked from an evil Pakistani arms dealer, take on what appears to
be the full, ferocious force of the L.A.P.D. But soon we return to
familiar territory as the surviving gang members rendezvous at their
warehouse hideout, there to settle the critical question of who among
them is actually an undercover police officer.

Following Bollywood's tradition of excessive generosity, Mr. Gupta
tosses in too much of just about everything, resulting in a two-and-a-
half-hour film that may exhaust some viewers. There are a couple of
extended, snazzily edited music videos, set in what is apparently Los
Angeles' most fabulous Hindi strip joint, as well as an amazing
sequence in which the men, chugging down Johnny Walker Black on the
night before the robbery, sing out their dreams and aspirations.
Scenes like this make you realize that Bollywood is essentially a
nonnarrative art form, in which coherent storytelling plays a
distinctly secondary role to the purple pleasures of the moment.

KAANTE

Directed by Sanjay Gupta; written (in English and Hindi, with English
subtitles) by Anurag Kashyap; music by Viju Sha; produced by Mr.
Gupta and Raju Sharad Patel; released by Media Partners. In Manhattan
at the Loews State Theater, 1540 Broadway, at 45th Street Running
time: 150 minutes. This film is not rated.

WITH: Amitabh Bachchan (Yashvardhan Rampal a k a Major), Sanjay Dutt
(Jay Rehan a k a Ajju), Sunil Shetty (Marc Isaak a k a the Bouncer),
Kumar Gaurav (Anand Mathur a k a Andy), Mahesh Manjrekar (Raj Yadav a
k a Baali) and Lucky Ali (Maqbool Haider a k a Mak).