• Friday, August 14, 2009

• Country:

  India

• Language:

  Hindi

• Runtime:

  135 mins

2009

KAMINEY is about a pair of twin brothers, Charlie & Guddu. Charlie lisps while Guddu has a stutter problem. They are as different as chalk and cheese. And they can't stand the sight of each other.

Till one fateful rainy night, their lives cross. Charlie gets mixed up in a deathly get rich quick scheme, while Guddu realizes that the love of his life, Sweety, has unwittingly put a price on his head. It's a dark comic ride there on as the brothers are sucked into a world of drugs, guns and money. Their lives collide head on with the lives of gangsters, rebel soldiers, rogue politicians and crooked cops.

In the middle of this crazy adventure, the brothers have to run to protect themselves, their dreams, their love....

And most importantly, realize that all they have is each other.

Characters:

Shahid Kapoor: Charlie
Makes a living hedging bets at the race course; he moves around the plush hordes of the rich and famous and aspires to be one of them, one day! Charlie is street sharp, wily and ballsy. But for himself, only!

Shahid Kapoor: Judd
Works as a trainee in an NGO firm; his dreams is to become a bonafide member of the Indian middle class. A careerist at heart, which in turn, he loses to the charming Sweety. Guddu, is honest, diligent and careful. Especially very careful!

Priyanka Chopra: Sweety
Young, Pretty and Fiery. Sweety Shekhar Bhope has all the trappings of an absolute firecracker. For someone who’s always lived in the shadow of her despot Brother, she finds true solace in Guddu’s arms.

Amole Gupte: Bhope
A small time gangster turned rouge politician; he fancies himself as the Messiah of the slums; a ‘Son of the soil’, his rabid racism and free for all vandalism has earned him his true reputation.

Carlos Paca: Cajetan
A rebel mercenary who will not flinch to pile up corpses to get what he wants. His deathly eyes can inspire fear in the bravest of men. Not to be crossed with.

Deb Mukherjee as Mujeeb & Rajatva Dutta as Shumon
Two of the most powerful bookies on the horse racing circuit; Horses, Guns and Women rule their passion. They have an unhealthy lust for power and money. Second only to their giddy love for their kid brother Mikhail.

Chandan Roy Sanyal: Mikhail
Wild and Reckless; nobody can tame this young colt; Mikhail dreams of being a bookie along with his best friend Charlie. The type of guy who acts before he thinks, then lives to pay for the consequences.

Tenzing Nima: Tashi
A maverick drug lord, Tashi is the Lord of high style and cold kills; a man of infinite patience, hell knows no bounds if he gets tickled down the wrong nerve.

Shiv Subrahmanyam as Lobo & Hrishikesh Joshi as Lele
There are bad cops, There are crooked cops and then There’s these two; two top notch Narcotics Officers, they are the brutal law of the land. Law, which is of the mafia and for the mafia.

Maxabout Review

Bold, Stark, Funny and Unpredictable with Genuine Surprises.. .

So delicious is the movie's gradual unravelling that I refuse outright to let you in on the plot itself -- an enthralling tale of drugs, deceit, dingbats and dead-ringers -- because you need to discover this on your own. Go in as fresh as you can, you deserve to taste this one by yourself. Letting on what actually happens would make me one of the film's titular knaves.

Vishal Bhardwaj reinvents the filmi rollercoaster with feverish glee as he takes a wonderfully twisty plot and paces it flawlessly around a bunch of madcap, irresistible characters. It takes nearly twenty minutes to get used to things, the characters, the words they speak, they way they speak them, and the tone of the film -- heck, to get used to this film's world. Then on, the film just freakin' flies.

And while films of this ilk are full of disposable-bodies and corpses-in-waiting, one discovers that Vishal has -- sneakily, stealthily, surreptitiously -- kept the sentiments so darned real that by the time the climax rolls around, you do actually give a damn about these characters.
Wow. Now if that isn't kameenapan, I don't know what is. Awefome.
So the film leaps through implied ultraviolence and dark humour and you hold on, exhilarated -- just as you have through, say, Guy Ritchie's Lock Stock And Two Smoking Barrels. And while that itself would be no mean feat, Bhardwaj ups the ante with an audacious climax, suddenly bringing emotions right to the fore.

KAMINEY lives up to the hype associated with it. The film has three stars -- Vishal Bhardwaj (a name that's immensely respected by moviegoers), Shahid Kapoor and 'Dhan Te Nan' -- and this combo as also the crooked characters and a genuinely hatke subject should guarantee ample footfalls in cineplexes even after its initial weekend.

Goofs

• Continuity: In the song "Raat Ke Dhai Baje", Shahid comes riding on a blue scooter, but afterwards a red scooter is shown, throughout the song and the following scene.

Trivias

• Priyanka Chopra and Shahid Kapur fell off a bike while shooting for Kaminey. The accident took place in Pune late Thursday (21st August 2008) while a scene that required Priyanka to ride a bike with Shahid on the back seat was being shot. The two were riding the bike on a slope that was slightly muddy when the two-wheeler skidded and the two fell off. And to make matter worse, the bike fell on top of them.
• While shooting for this movie, Priyanka Chopra travelled in a local train from Goregaon to Churchgate to attend the award ceremony (at NCPA, Nariman Point) which was scheduled post the shoot. Since Priyanka was aware of Mumbai's traffic jam, she preferred travelling by train and wore a "burkha" to hide her identity. The organisers of the awards ceremony sent a car to pick her up from the Churchgate station.
• Priyanka Chopra played this extremely vocal Maharashtrian girl who believed in making herself heard and hence Vishal Bhardwaj made sure her voice was heard far and wide, due to which Priyanka had much trouble while shooting as Vishal Bhardwaj had been making her scream her lungs off for the film.
• This movie will be the debut of the screen writer Amole Gupte as an actor. He wrote the screenplay for Taare Zameen Par (2007).
• Shahid Kapur worked out for six months and took lessons in stammering from an ENT specialist to fit into his roles in the film. He plays a double role in the film as twin brothers, one (Charlie) of whom has lisp and a rough and tough physique like a slum-dweller boy while the other (Guddu) stammers.
• For the choreography of the song sequence "Dhan-Te-Nan" in the film, the actors were briefed to "just dance with the song but not to do any (dance) steps in it"