There's a truly wonderful set of scenes where Aman attempts to discover his powers and choose a costume, and these include references to the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Tarzan, and Superman, as well as the martial arts films of Bruce Lee (he fights tennis balls (not ping pong balls) with nunchaku and frames himself constantly against the sunrise), and India's own superhero films and parodies, most notably Krrish (2006), Quick Gun Murugun (2009), and Enthiran (2010). This isn't a film that pretends being a superhero is the hardest thing in the world it's one that sees it as a mix of joy and duty, and that's a rare and wonderful thing to see these days. It's amazing that this film exists for so many reasons, but the main one is that its protagonist, Aman Dhillon (played by Tiger Shroff), is not just genuinely loveable, but hilariously willing to admit to his own excitement about superheroes and locate himself within this nostalgia.
Or at least that's what I thought until I watched A Flying Jatt, Remo D'Souza's 2016 Bollywood offering to the genre. When a superhero is more likely to be either offensive, boring, or some combination of the two rather than likeable, there's not a lot of appeal left in the genre as a whole.
A FLYING JATT SERIES
The grand majority of Hollywood's offerings in the genre, and even Bollywood's more awkward contributions of the Krrish series and RaOne, have left much to be desired in their narrative choices. If this seems like a sweeping castigation of a great deal of contemporary blockbuster cinema, that's only because it very emphatically is. Weep with me in despairing confusion as bad lighting and massive eight-pack polyurethane abs abound like ostrich-egg-holders welded to a man's belly as he charges heroically through primarily white neighbourhoods hypocritically vowing to protect life while inflicting massive bodily injury. As a result, I've spent many a weekend gritting my teeth through what has become the standard formula of any superhero film: a parade of barely witty quips thrown in around the imagery of institutionalized militarism. Given the recent market glut of superhero films, I think I've spent the last couple of years watching more movies in this genre than not, though this has had increasingly less to do with rose-tinted nostalgia for the days of Superman movies and Shaktimaan and more to do with the fact that I've started to write about militarised masculinities in actual detail. It might make sense, as you read this, if you imagine my face frozen in a rictus of confused (and occasionally horrified) joy, as that might be a start to understanding the sheer depth of emotion I've felt over these two and a half hours of film.
0 kommentar(er)
