One look at the biggest money-making commercial Hindi cinema in recent years and you’ll know the action is back. It’s the cheeky ode to the high wattage Tamil masala movies that saw Ghajini, Wanted and Dabangg make big bucks at the box office and now it’s time for the king of the jungle to roar. No, the king here is not Shah Rukh Khan and the jungle is not what comes to mind… get ready for Singham, which as his name suggests means well, a lion!
Singham History
Rohit Shetty, also known for his runaway comic hits like Golmaal, is switching gears with this new take on the eponymous Suriya. The story of an honest and impulsive policeman who takes on the big bad, serenades the doe-eyed girl, and does almost everything a typical Hindi movie hero does was one of Suriya’s biggest hits. While the basic premise as well as the original villain, Prakash Raj, remain the same, Shetty has, by his own words, reworked almost 70% of the film.
Singham is about Bhajirao Singham (Ajay Devgn) who fights against Jaikant Shikre (Prakash Raj) a politically connected villain on the Goa-Maharashtra border and has a very old high adrenaline action. From the looks of it, Singam is called Ajay Devgn’s Dabangg, but the action man refutes the accusation and suggests that he is simply reverting to his action avatar.
While Shetty says that he has made the Hindi version as a standalone feature, he has kept the gritty, hard-hitting action that was also a highlight of the original. Ajay Devgn has done most of his stunts himself and Shetty insists that audiences will be heart-stopping when they see the action. Singham will also have a car chase, something that every Rohit Shetty movie features, but this time it would be… different.
Bollywood Trends
For years, ‘Bollywood’ believed that the best way to ensure the success of a film was to remake an already successful one. It didn’t matter where they got the movie from, as long as it had the right ingredients; nowadays they don’t even bother to change the titles! The peak number of Tamil films being remade into Hindi occurred in the 1960s and 1980s, but it was only with the great success of Ghajini that interest in remaking Tamil films was revived. While Dabangg cannot be called a remake, it owes its genesis in movies like Samy and the fact that writer/director Abhinav Kashyap is a big fan of the Tamil masala film only helped.
In addition to raising curiosity about Tamil films, Ghajini, who coincidentally also starred as Suriya, set the trend where all the leading actors began looking for a film that would reconnect them with single-screen audiences as well as the vast majority. which is very far from the subways and the multiplexes. . Dabangg’s triumph only furthered the search, so it’s no surprise that one of the original action men, Ajay Devgn, isn’t joining the party. And Ajay Devgn shines in it!
Singham Rating: 2.5/5
Singham Star Cast: Ajay Devgn, Kajal Aggarwal, Prakash Raj, Sonali Kulkarni, Sudhanshu Pandey
Singham Directed by: Rohit Shetty
Singham Duration: 2 hours 20 minutes
Singham Release Date: July 22, 2011
