I find this kind of gleeful brutality hard to stomach. So should you see Shootout at Wadala? I think it’s an acquired taste. Even in death, Manoj comes off as underworld royalty. I also enjoyed the devious Haksar brothers. But Sanjay does get a career best performance out of John. And every few minutes, a character struts into frame, glares and takes his shades off.
The film mythologizes these men and makes a fetish of their bodies – John’s chest gets as much footage as Leone’s. The official Facebook page of Shootout at Wadala describes it as “an epic story with overwhelming machismo”. In one scene, ACP Afaaque says he understands why the police uniform is khaki-colored – so people can excrete all over them and no one will notice. The choicest ones are so crass that I can’t repeat them. Milap Zaveri’s dialogue doesn’t leave much to the imagination either. At one point, Sunny Leone performs wearing a bikini top so strategically placed that I felt like her chest was a separate character in the song. I think the motto was: when in doubt, insert an item song because there are three in this film, each one more unnecessary than the next. There is little connective tissue between the set-pieces. Shootout at Wadala is a strangely disjointed film. And the narration is breathless, like one of those sensational true crime television shows.īut what Sanjay and his team of writers forget to provide is a coherent screenplay. The action is determinedly brutal – one man’s head is crushed in a gola-making machine. Sanjay effectively creates powerful set-pieces, including the climactic shootout at Wadala.
Sanjay creates an interesting framing device – a dying Manya narrates his life story to the cop, Afaaque Baagraan played by Anil Kapoor, who shot him. Hussain Zaidi’s Dongri to Dubai: 6 Decades of Mumbai Mafia, is captivating with half a dozen intriguing characters from Surve, played by John Abraham, who is an educated Hindu don to the ruthless brothers Zubair and Dilawar, obvious stand-ins for Sabir and Dawood, played by Manoj Bajpayee and Sonu Sood. Which makes him the perfect fit for Shootout at Wadala, a partly fictionalized story of the Mumbai mafia in the 1970s and early 80s and the city’s first encounter killing, in which the Mumbai police gunned down a dreaded criminal Manya Surve after he had surrendered. The Front Row review of Shootout At Wadalaįrom his first film Aatish: Feel the Fire in 1994, director Sanjay Gupta has been fascinated with men, guns and men with guns.
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