Chak De! India Review…
Posted by Prashanth | Filed under Uncategorized
Finally, I have seen it. After creating a sensation across the country and lots of anticipation in my mind, Chak De! India has been one of the more successful movies that Bollywood would have this year. I was trying to get the tickets till 2 weeks after the movie’s release only to go an empty hall on one fateful day when Delhi-aites suddenly thought its time to quit movies. Guys in my class have licked their pockets dry to see this movie multiple times. Reviews from the critics were really really impressive too. I just had to get my eyes and ears on it… finally I did. So here is what I think….
Cast
- Shahrukh Khan … Kabir Khan
- Vidya Malvade … Vidya Sharma
- Sagarika Ghatge … Preeti Sabarwal (whistles..!!)
- Chitrashi Rawat … Komal Chautala
- Shilpa Shukla … Bindia Naik
Now, I am not vela enough to list the entire hockey team of 11…
Plot + Synopsis
The movie is said to be distantly based on the life of Mir Ranjan Negi, who was some bloke who was screwed because his team faced a humiliating 7-1 defeat in Asian Games (such things are common in Cricket and Football!) and that too against Pakistan. At that time, India wasn’t habituated to losing to Pakistan and accepting defeat shamelessly and complacently the way it does today. So this poor guy’s career was sucked dry and he made a comeback 16 years later as the coach of the women’s hockey team which won gold at the 2002 Common Wealth Games. Now, 5 years from there, he is back to coaching women. He trained 16 women/girls who didn’t even know how to hold hockey sticks to seemingly look like sporting personalities. Yeah, Mr. Negi does have a role to play in the movie, he is the actual coach. Good Job mate!
Now enough of trivia, let me get down to business. Kabir Khan is in a similar plight. Not only is he the unlucky captain of the team which loses to Pakistan in the finals, but also the one who misses the penalty shootout and also the one who is alleged of match-fixing. After facing intense humiliation in the desi-style, which includes getting dejected by the entire country especially the neighborhood that forces him to leave his ancestral home to (figuratively) live in exile. 7 years and 42 days later… (I am not kidding. If you see the movie again, in a dialogue, he says - “Saath saal, ek mahina aur baara din lage mujhe…” total that up, 30+12=42!) he makes a comeback to coach a team which is not yet made. The 16 shortlisted candidates from each state are then introduced. On seeing the trailers and banners of the movie, I had made up my mind that there is nobody in this movie to gawk at and let alone continue gawking even after the movie is done. But then, what I saw there actually stumped me. They didn’t showcase 16 supermodels in shorts and short tees, but one debutant really rocked and made watching the movie a lot more worthwhile… Sagarika Ghatge was the queen of this movie for sure!
And the training, planning, and playing goes on… Politics, both internal and external come in their way, mass sulking takes place, then mass revival does, and finally everyone starts feeling motivated to play the big tournament ahead. As expected India wins gold there thus stealing the rights to lick the trophie leaving SRK astonishingly surprised. So that was what the movie about.
Analysis + Verdict
Choice of characters is one thing that is important in any movie which features broad ethnicity. CDI makers did do well with the job of getting people who could speak in the typical tongue of their state but didn’t do the best job in assigning dialogues. At times, it felt as if some Great Indian Laughter Challenge guy is mimicking someone from another state. Slapstick comedy mostly containing humor pertaining to the accent and the use of words was put on the girls. Seriously, Paresh Raval and Rajpal Yadav style humor don’t suit girls very much. It was good that they thought of showing diversity, but there should have been limit towards doing so using vernacularisms. All the Sardar jokes which you people might have heard till date were thrown on one of the girls who was from Punjab. Similarly, stereotyped Jaat behaviour of being wild and short-tempered was thrown on someone from Haryana.
The composition of the team was expected too. You have people with diverse emotions in there ranging from egoistic to self-centered to envious to high tempered behavior. You have people having the ‘union leader’ traits as well. While making the movie look more real, the makers actually made it more dramatic. But then to partially compensate all this, we had SRK. No h-h-h-hockey sort of speech in vibration mode, no Kal Ho Naa Ho-like emotional sequences involving heavy breathing. His face and eyes did a fantastic job.
Then comes the presentation of the story. I experienced Deja Vu throughout the movie before each and every SRK dialogue. Everything that the council speaks, everything that SRK says to his team was clichéd and expected. Although SRK was at his usual best, the script writers had to do some work before making such a predictable movie, it had to be different from conventional sports based movies.
One thing that was different was the fact that they used real locations to shoot the movie. Unlike movies like Iqbal, where a large part of the matches were shot in movie sets, this one made use of an actual hockey stadium. Someone finally thought about hockey and made others think about it too. People of India are simply not interested in the game despite the fact that premier hockey leagues (PHL) do exist in India with rivaling clubs. For many reasons (which I am not able to phrase right now), people don’t see hockey the same way they see cricket or football. This fact was shown in the movie as well. And after the movie, it seems that the hockey team got a few new sponsors along with a boost with the govt. aid as well.
Now coming to the matches, which formed a significant 42% of the showtime of the movie seriously broke my heart. After watching movies like Goal! featuring continuous raw camera footage of the match which made it look more realistic and action-packed than what we see on television, this was totally unexciting. Here, the match is shown as if the power to the camera is continuously switching from one camera to the next in sequential order. Picture this, a girl is shown from her head to torso swinging the hockey stick and in the next scene you only see a stick hitting a ball and in the scene after that you see it flying into the goal with someone blurry jumping towards it. That is simply so bad when compared to the adrenaline-rushing sequences in Goal!
And of course, I expected the team to win marginally in the finals. I was just so dámn pìššëd with the final match that I almost cried. The match ends in a draw after several substitutions and dramatized pieces of advice leading to a penalty shootout. The makers expect the viewers to stay gripped to the seat keeping their fingers crossed till the last decisive shot of the penalty was taken. Excitement, my foot! They just added more showtime with this. The people simply enjoyed the final match with no scene longer than 2 seconds. Add to it highly patriotic and inspiring tunes with extremely determined lyrics. Why? All I can say is that they haven’t seen a hockey match before or they haven’t seen Goal! yet.
Anything good about the movie? Sagarika Ghatge for one. Other than that, there was some uniformity for a change in a Bollywood movie. SRK wasn’t the only noticeable one here. Almost every character got deserving amounts of showtime. It is a great movie for kids. The soundtrack was average, but due to good timing, it blended well with the movie. Truly enough, this is yet another warrant to the fact that Bollywood disparately wants to grow up and is experimenting with stuff for that… that is a really nice thing to know for sure. I end this absurdly long review with my final verdict. CDI wasn’t the best of the movies I have seen, and I must say, I went there with high expectations and was disappointed.
Rating: 6.5/10. 
liked this content, subscribe to the Entries RSS Feed or the Comments RSS Feed. You can even subscribe via email updates.
3 Responses to “Chak De! India Review…”
-
Says:
September 15th, 2007 at 10:10 pm[...] Original post by Prashanth [...]
-
Says:
September 18th, 2007 at 1:02 pmsomebody seems to be in love with Sagarika Ghatge…
i loved this movie
-
Says:
September 22nd, 2007 at 4:28 pmlove srk
