Bollywood six-month report card: Film industry’s in a free-fall, but where’s the bottom?

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A bunch of mid-range, middling films, quite unexpectedly, have kept things from going totally under. Cue, Teri Baaton Mein Aisa Uljha Jiya. Shaitaan. Article 370. Madgaon Express. Crew. Swatantrya Veer Savarkar. The only thing common in these films is that they weren’t mounted as starry vehicles revolving around heroes.

Take, for example, Teri Baaton Mein Aisa Uljha Jiya: If Shahid Kapoor was the big male star in this human-robot love story, leading lady Kriti Sanon had an equally sizeable part, and a crack climactic sequence featuring the latter became the thing viewers laughed the most at.

Shaitaan had both Ajay Devgn and R Madhavan doing the heavy lifting, with the latter comprehensively stealing the film from the former, but the stars did the story’s bidding, not the other way round.

Films like Shaitaan, Teri Baaton Mein Aisa Uljha Jiya, Article 370, Madgaon Express, Crew and Swatantrya Veer Savarkar kept things from going totally under.

Article 370 was straight-up propaganda, yes, but this set-in-Kashmir-fighting-terrorism film smartly set up a brisk pace, and let its leading ladies Yami Gautam and Priyamani lead the narrative, making it a refreshing change from the jaded male stars doing ditto.

I’m really not mad about Madgaon Express, but compared to the sad-sack starry outings, this three-bumbling-guys-in-Goa-caper, starring Avinash Tiwary, Divyenndu and Pratik Gandhi, is a clear winner. Its high point was Pratik Gandhi, who turned out to be a revelation: Who knew he could do loonytunes as well as a cheating husband in the Netflix rom-com ‘Do Aur Do Pyaar’?

Speaking of streaming, all I’ll say for this year’s ‘original’ OTT films is that they didn’t exactly cover themselves with glory, the last one being the disappointing ‘Maharaj’; except for the Diljit Dosanjh-Parineeti Chopra musical starrer ‘Amar Singh Chamkila’, nothing else shone. But more on the streamers later; back to theatres for now.

Randeep Hooda’s let’s-get-Savarkar-on-the-right-side-of-history was worth my time simply because of his terrific performance as the titular character. You can see where he’s going with the rest of it, including its attempt to diminish Gandhi’s stature, and you can safely ignore it.

Two stand-out films, Kiran Rao’s ‘Laapata Ladies’ and Varun Grover’s ‘All India Rank’ were pointers towards the kind of films that Bollywood should be veering towards, in terms of staying steadfast to their premise, where concept and execution are given equal weightage. Rao’s ‘Laapata Ladies’ is a feel-good feminist fable which doesn’t draw back from its eagerness to distill life lessons for its characters, but also doesn’t allow the messages to stream-roll over the film. Grover’s ‘All India Rank’ does have a seen-it-before patina ( blame it on all those ‘Kota Factories’ and ‘12th Fail’ which managed to get to us first), but there isn’t any doubt that Grover’s voice is his own.

One of my other favourite Bollywood films of the year (up until now) is ‘Crew’, which got on board two of Bollywood’s snazziest, sassiest female stars, Tabu and Kareena, gave them Kriti Sanon to make up a trio, and let them loose in a plot driven by fun. This is one of those films whose success is a marker: not only will it encourage the producers to go down the less-beaten path, it will get more bums on seats for films featuring ladies log, who are not scared to own their age, or their libido, or both.

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It’s worth noting that ‘women-oriented’ films have always been looked down upon as somehow lesser, just the way ‘chick-lit’ is used dismissively for books. Well, sucks to that. The ‘Crew’ ladies are here to tell us that they are the right choice, baybee: ‘Kitna foundation lagayegi Cleopatra’ is destined to go down as one of 2024’s catchiest lines.

The solo exception in this slate is ‘Munjya’, a teen-horror-supernatural-comedy, which has turned into a sleeper hit, and given a great deal of joy to producers Maddock Films. Again, it was far from perfect, moving too quickly away from effective horror to long, slack stretches of clump-comedy, but its cast was fresh (no stars, yeahhh), and its very likeable granny-kiddo combo was a winner. Befuddled legacy studios  may do well with a Be Like Munjya placard on their walls.

It’s worth nothing, though, that none of these Bollywood films has come anywhere close to the fine, fine films being made in Malayalam: it’s not as if the previous decade and more hasn’t seen one ace film after another coming out of the Kochi Collective, but this year, it’s been a flood.

The all-boys-rescue-team in ‘Manjummel Boys’, Fahad Faasil’s blindingly white-on-white version of krazycool in ‘Aavesham’, Prithviraj Sukumaran’s jaw-dropping transformation in survival thriller ‘Aadujeevitham‘, leading up to the last fortnight’s superb outing, ‘Ullozhukku’, starring Urvashi and Parvathy, in a tale full of piercing humanity. And Prasanna Vithanage may be a Sri Lankan director, but his fabulous drama ‘Paradise’ is headlined by Roshan Mathew and Darshana Rajendran, both actors working primarily in Malayalam movies.

‘Ullozhukku’ is produced by Ronnie Screwala’s RSVP, and is a welcome step towards setting up collaborations across regions and languages, which may be an important way to break the stasis Bollywood finds itself in. Letting in fresh talent, breaking gate-keeping codes, and yes, most importantly, reducing back-breaking star fees: the faster Bollywood realises how urgent these course-corrections are, the faster it will revive.

Kalki 2898 AD is currently dominating the Indian box office.

Or we will be back to playing the numbers game: did ‘Kalki 2898 AD’, the mega-budget (Rs 600 crores!!!) sci-fi tentpole starring Amitabh Bachchan, Kamal Haasan, Prabhas and Deepika Padukone, get an opening? How much has it made? How much will it end up making? Is the South once again giving Bollywood a run for its money?

And once again, the real questions will be drowned.

The only question is: is Bollywood making anything that’s worth our while anymore? Hollywood, which was also in the doldrums these past sixth months, has got a serious shot in the arm by the bonafide blockbuster status of the beautifully done animation ‘Inside Outside 2’, still going strong domestically and overseas. Whether ‘Kalki 2898 AD’ rolls over into clear profits remains to be seen: yes, that pesky math thing.

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Does Bollywood have any upcoming films which will it get us into the movie hall first-day-first-show and fork out money for overpriced tickets-and-popcorn, instead of waiting for it come to a streaming platform?

You tell me.