Movie Review: Special 26
So they loot the rich, and keep for themselves. Why the faux drama?
The first thing, I believe, any keen eyed spectator of Neeraj Pandey's new film "Special 26" will notice is that there's a whole lot of walking happening on screen. Leads, supporting, extras, dawdle, whizz, power walk in a mix of urgent-looking expressions away from or towards the camera.
This much walking can only mean one thing: there's an insistent predicament at work.
It is sometime in the 1980's – a decade free of multimedia distractions (also the facet helping "Special 26" the most) – when a group of con men personate as Central Bureau of Investigation officers loot illegally accumulated wealth from politicians and millionaires.
The money (and jewelry), of course is made out of the books, and reporting it to the authorities opens the looted party to unwarranted scrutiny.
Whoever the looters really were (I am talking about the originals looters, because "Special 26" is adapted from history), they clearly had a plan.
Flash-forward to 2013 and Mr. Pandey's film: the looters plan now metamorphoses into a superficial construct. Mr. Pandey, whose debut film "A Wednesday" was in 2008, builds on what may have happened, and for sake of spicing things up with dramatic ingenuity, turns it into codswallop.
"Special 26", whose title makes sense only by the film's last quarter, opens routinely enough; The police, led by the neophyte and naive Ranveer Singh (Jimmy Shergill) is hoodwinked into assisting a CBI raid led by Ajay Singh and P.K. Sharma (Akshay Kumar and Anupam Kher); the raid, though successful (the minister in question had his cash, stashed everywhere including the ceiling), is absolute hogwash.
Ranveer, disgraced and suspended when he puts two and two together, goes to the real CBI, who, until then, are oblivious of their doppelganger’s existence.
Naturally, they assign the film's Tom Hanks to Akshay Kumar's Leonardo DiCaprio, A no-nonsense by-the-book CBI officer Waseem Khan (the always excellent Manoj Baypayee) whose ambition to doggedly pursue Ajay and co has little to do with morality of their crime. Waseem’s only interest, from what we're told on the screen anyways, is that this is part of his job description.
And this is actually one of "Special 26's" main drawbacks: the characters are written for what they ought to be doing and little else.
For example: Ajay is a former CBI trainee, eliminated by a bad interview (ergo: his sharp noggin and his line of hoodwinking).
