Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. I became aware of this movie, Bollywood’s CHANDNI CHOWK TO CHINA, only recently. I don’t follow Bollywood, I’m sorry to say. In fact this film might even be my… second or third… beginning to end Bollywood film.
And I typically have an odd reaction to Bollywood flicks. I always tend to love the musical numbers and dance stuff, but find myself bored to tears with the rest of it. Maybe I’ve matured over my first teenage viewings of Indian cinema or maybe I just didn’t see the good stuff. I couldn’t even tell you what I watched before, but I think it was a couple of ‘70s Bollywood flicks.
There’s a Cinemark in Austin that has one screen reserved for Bollywood films. It’s odd… it’s a shitty little multiplex barely hanging on in South Austin that gives multiple screens to the usual crap (PAUL BLART, I’m looking at you), but they always, always, always have at least one screen devoted to a new Bollywood film.
I watched THE READER there recently and decided to walk over after Kate Winslet finally learned to read and the credits rolled. I didn’t technically theater-hop. I didn’t sit down, just stood off to the side for a moment watching a crazy dweeby Indian man sing and dance like a fucking rock star, wooing an incredibly hot woman.
I kind of decided then and there that I would start checking out the Bollywood flicks that came through this theater and, as luck would have it, one of the biggest Bollywood US releases was on the horizon and that’s the film I watched Friday night and feel compelled to write up today.
CHANDNI CHOWK TO CHINA is absolutely fucking ridiculous. Fuck. Ing. Re-Dick-U-Loos. But in all the best ways. In the same ways that Stephen Chow’s movies are fucking ridiculous. In the same way the Coyote and Roadrunner cartoons are ridiculous, except on a much bigger scale with dash of curry.
It really did remind me of KUNG FU HUSTLE. It has a comically strong old man who is always there with a free kick in the ass for his adopted son, the klutz turned martial arts master star of the movie Sidhu (Akshay Kumar), that sends him into the heavens, above the town of Chandi Chowk, hanging for a few beats before falling back down to earth.
But imagine KUNG FU HUSTLE mixed with a Bruce Lee movie mixed with the 36TH CHAMBER OF SHAOLIN mixed with SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE, with a dash of MOULIN ROUGE, James Bond and an Adam Sandler movie. I know that last ingredient smells bad, but trust me… when you mix it all together it makes a delicious dish.
Sidhu is a vegetable chopper in the city of Chandni Chowk, frustrated with his place in life, searching for something greater. He thinks he finds it in a potato that kind of resembles God Ganesh… and maybe he did, but not in the way he thinks. That potato causes a series of fights between Sidhu and his Dada, the absolute badass Mithun Chakraborty (what an awesome name) who has the strong kick that sends Sidhu to the heavens once more. When he falls back down to Earth he lands at the feet of two Chinese men who are in a mission trying to find the reincarnated form of the legendary protector of their small village, which is located near the Great Wall of China.
With some sneaky translating from Sidhu’s greedy sham mystic friend, Chopstick (Ranvir Shorey), Sidhu thinks their repeating the phrase Kill Hojo means that he is cool. Chopstick sees a chance for a free trip to China and some loot and women, so he keeps lying to Sidhu about what the Chinese are actually wanting. He even has the angel and devil on his shoulder gag… but in a fucked up way… This character is supposed to be half Chinese and half Indian… the Angel is represented as a clean cut Indian him, dressed all in white and the devil is his Chinese half in a red kimono!!! Seriously!
Anyway, what the villagers need is someone to protect them from the evil bowler-hat wearing Hojo (the great Gordon Liu from the aforementioned 36TH CHAMBER OF SHAOLIN and, of course, the KILL BILL films) who is essentially the evil Chinese version of Oddjob from James Bond, with a killer razor-tipped boomerang bowler hat.
I don’t know exactly what he’s doing… he looks like the head of an evil corporation, but somehow the villagers are doing a lot of regular hard labor. Oh, and he smuggles diamonds.
Did I mention this movie is 2 ½ hours long?
It’s epic. You can tell a shit-load of money went into this thing. I’ll be damned if they didn’t actually film on the Great Wall of China or at least spent enough money to fake me out, but there are a ton of fight scenes on the wall and the whole thing is chock (or should I say “chowk”) full of production value.
The dance numbers are mostly woven in through dream sequences and parties… I figured it’d be a given that a movie in which a man can get kicked up into the clouds and fall back to Earth, where a hot girl can have an iPod that can act as a translator for any language and where a vegetable chopper can learn the art of kung fu and take down a master like Gordon Liu that they wouldn’t have any worry about trying to explain away a traditional Bollywood dance and musical number within the story, but I guess I was wrong.
The songs are catchy and I love that there didn’t seem to be any attempt at actually matching the words to the singers’ lips. Instead of getting professionals (outside of the leads) they cast faces, especially with the Chinese actors. There’s one scene in particular that is a delight, but I need to set it up…
The female lead is the stunning Deepika Padukone in dual roles. One is Sakhi, a famous Indian television personality, and the other is Meow Meow, Gordon Liu’s lead assassin/drug runner. Hold on, it’ll make sense in a minute…
Good God, she’s stunning.
Anyway, there’s an elaborate soap opera-ish backstory for Padukone’s characters… They’re twins, one with slightly more Asian features because she’s the product of a marriage between a Chinese man and an Indian woman. Her father was a police inspector who was a thorn in Liu’s side, so one day… on the Great Wall of China, of course… Liu stages an attack on Chiang, her father (played by Roger Yuan) and ends up stealing one of the girls, assuming Chiang’s death… and rightly so… The fucker falls off the Great Wall of China, but I guess nobody can die of a fall in this universe.
Instead Chiang becomes an old beggar, haunted by flashes of memory of his previous life, but unable to get his head on straight and fully realize who he is.
One of his daughters goes to India, becomes the face of a dance gadget… a belt that loops around your legs and forces you to dance in different styles depending on what button is pressed… and the other is Hojo’s henchwoman.
So, the Indian girl has always felt something missing and goes to China around the same time Sidhu is recruited by the villagers to be their savior. One of her first stops is a factory in China run by the company she works for where she runs into a Chinese labor room led by the Chinese Q.
I’m not kidding. He provides her with a spray that is essentially a punch in a can, a bullet-proof parachute umbrella and her magical iPod and pink studded earpiece that allows her to understand and speak in any language. All in a bizarre musical sequence that feels more like it should be in something like THE RETURN OF CAPTAIN INVINCIBLE than in a Bollywood flick. It’s just fun and the Chinese actors look like they were pulled out of Chinese restaurants around India and are having a blast being bad at singing and dancing in this movie.
The first half is Sidhu acting the fool and then the second half turns suddenly serious. The tone shift is radical and doesn’t ever really return to the goofiness of the beginning. Sidhu has everything stripped from him and hits rock bottom.
It’s here that he comes under the tutelage of Roger Yuan, the crazy beggar ex-policeman and father of the two hotties. And the movie turns to the typical chop sockey structure of the hopeless student slowly learning the ways of Kung Fu to exact revenge. It’s very much 36th CHAMBER OF SHAOLIN.
There are some plot holes… For instance, Sidhu has a great fight the first time he’s out after the training where does powerful Matrix shit and then for some reason he never unleashes the stuff again, even when he’s overpowered during the climactic fight with Gordon Liu.
But that’s okay. The movie had me by this point and Akshay Kumar is a surprisingly good fighter, so I didn’t mind the tonal shift.
I have to recommend that you guys check your local listings and give this one a shot if it’s playing near you, even if you have never seen a Bollywood film before. It’s crazy, it’s convoluted, it’s overly convenient at times, but it’s really fucking entertaining.
I have to put a PS to this review… This is a spoiler, so don’t read if you don’t want to know…
But at the very end of the movie, after Sidhu defeats Liu, he’s celebrating with the town… and Chinese midgets covered in dirt and wearing grass skirts come up to him. He asks what is wrong and they speak the click language!!! They are, apparently, African (I guess the dirt is the Indian or Chinese version of blackface?) and need his help, prompting a return of Sadhi in Chandni Chowk to Africa.
I would kill your mother, my mother and all the mothers in the world to see a sequel where Sadhi uses his new-found super Kung Fu to rescue a village of dirty Chinese click-language speaking midgets for 2 ½ hours. Pllllleeeeaaassseeee movie Gods! I don’t ask for a lot… just give me this one thing…
-Quint
quint@aintitcool.com
