Once Upon A Time in Mumbaai

Rating: **

A scene in the film takes you swooping up to one of Mumbai’s high-rises,from where an ambitious hood surveys the twinkling fairy-tale cusp of Marine Drive,and calls the city a ‘mehbooba’ which will slip out of his grasp if he loosens his fist. The time is the 70s,when the city,still formally Bombay,was informally divvied up between a bunch of gangsters. ‘Once Upon A Time In Mumbaai’ is the latest homage to the romantic myth of Haji Mastan,the gangster who once upon a time owned the city,and has never since let go of our imaginings.

The challenge in a film like this,which entwines mobsters and ‘mehboobas’,is to make it all new,because of the past classics which have soared with the same dramatis personae. Milan Luthria rises only partially to it : he starts off well,and carries on as he means to,but then falls into the trap of the familiar. ‘Once Upon A Time In Mumbaai’ doesn’t match up to that spectacular scene where the city lies below,in all its glittery splendour,never quite becoming the great retro chic gangster flick that it sets out to be.

The big strengths of the slickly shot film are the two principal leads,Ajay Devgn and Kangana Ranaut. As Sultan Mirza,Devgn breathes freshness into a character we’ve seen several times before ( he’s done it himself in ‘Company’),his rise to the top of the mafia pile speedily etched : the soot-laden lad who shovels coal all day long on the docks turns into a man who dresses all in white,all the time,and engages in black-marketeering of an order the country had never witnessed before,  the smuggled Johnny Walkers and the Wrangler jeans and the gold coins pouring in through Bombay’s porous shoreline.

Like Mastan,(whom Sultan has nothing to do with of course,as a statutory warning in the beginning of the film reminds us),Sultan rips off the top,and gets rich. Like Mastan,he doesn’t deal in things that will harm – hooch and drugs. Like Mastan,he turns into a benevolent underworld don,always ready with a handout to a beggar woman who blesses him with ‘duas’.

When he’s not breaking bread with other ‘bhais’,he is romancing Rehana ( Ranaut),the other highlight of the film. She is a glamorous filmstar who enslaves the hardened criminal : one of the best written scenes belongs to them as they celebrate his ‘birthday’,where he places his heart on his ultra-white sleeve. In her tall bouffant and fish-tailed ‘kajal’,and imparting of feeling of being lived in,Ranaut lends weight to the film. As the upright cop who goes after the gangs,Randeep Hooda is effective,too.

It’s Emraan Hashmi as Shoaib,the young whelp who challenges Sultan’s might,who creates staleness. Not even being paired with Prachi Desai,his sweet shop assistant girl-friend,helps. The second half gets lost in patchy writing and the creakily done conflict of the principled mob boss vs the unscrupulous rebel. Everyone talks and talks in aphorisms and the dialogue which makes you smile with pleasure when you first hear it turns tiresome. It’s well begun but not done,just like the film.

shubhra.gupta@expressindia.com