Gunday is not a great film. From time to time, it pretends as if it has something to say about Very Important Matters - the tragedies of war and divided nations, for instance, or the inefficacy of a system that alternately ignore and oppress the underprivileged, or immigrant identity and the stigma that accompanies it. It doesn’t really have much to say about these Very Important Matters, however. The narrative isn’t much interested in exploring its titular protagonists beyond their attractively bronzed surfaces. Bikram (Ranveer Singh) and Bala (Arjun Kapoor) are lifelong friends; they’ve turned to crime because the straight and narrow didn’t work for them; their quest for power owes itself to insecurities stemming from their identity as refugees from across the border; they’re insanely in love with the same woman. All of this is great material for an absorbing, memorable masala entertainer, the sort Gunday repeatedly pays homage to. Take Deewar, for instance, in which we find a protagonist whose trajectory is similar to the ones in Gunday. But Vijay’s descent into darkness carries much more weight, because his angst and his disillusionment are fully realized in the narrative, and the relationship with his estranged mother gives his arc great emotional urgency. Gunday pays lip service to the ideals of friendship and love, but none of these big emotions are anchored in anything beyond stray lines. The characters talk with great somberness about the injustice, about why they are the way they are, but we’d rather have seen them live through the circumstances that form them, motivate them, and wreck them.
The most involving section of the film, in fact, is the prologue, in which we watch the young Bikram and Bala (played by two excellent child actors) survive truly harrowing situations. We watch them protect each other, and we believe in their love for each other. We feel for these plucky, mistreated kids. If the film were about these children, we'd be rooting for them throughout. But the film is about grown-up Bikram and Bala, and we don't really see grown-up Bikram and Bala suffer. I didn't know why I ought to be on their side even as they killed cops doing their jobs and threatened to set the city on fire. Montages of our heroes chilling with nuns and laughing with the poor didn't convince me. I needed a couple heavy-duty, expertly written scenes that would win me over to their crime-happy corner. Even more fatally for a film about an epic friendship, we don’t get any particularly moving moment that conveys fully the depth of these men's feelings toward each other. Both are very demonstrative, and have a good time together, and the two leads project a convincingly warm sort of bonhomie. I admit I bought that these guys were great pals, but the actors' chemistry sold me on their friendship, not the writing, which reaches for the kind of high drama that it doesn’t quite earn.
Despite all of the not insignificant problems I've listed above, Gunday is quite often during its considerable running time (a large chunk of which, I suppose, is taken up by slow-mo running) an enormously entertaining affair. It looks fantastic, for one. The film's aesthetic is one of unwavering, joyously gaudy exuberance. The on-location scenes have a vividness and tang to them. The song-and-dance numbers are colorful and energetic, though the Punjabi influence in much of the music is confounding. The period detailing isn't over-fussy, but you get the sense, in scenes set in the boys' office or living quarters, for instance, that some care has gone into creating a world that feels, if not painstakingly authentic, then at least something like the one we know from the films of the Seventies and Eighties. The film is never entirely, depressingly generic-looking, unlike a number of the recent (and much more expensive) superstar-driven actioners that I can think of. Even the big action set pieces (atop a train, amid the crowds at a Durga Puja, in a coalmine) are staged with the kind of flair that is entirely missing in so many of those bigger films, where wire-fu action beats are slapped together with some tired comedy. (There is some ridiculous action choreography here as well, but, overall, all the kicks and punches fly about with a good deal of zip.) The director, Ali Abbas Zafar, may not be skilled enough to ballast his second feature with the emotional heft that made the films he's inspired by so memorable. But he does seem to have a handle on the unashamedly pulpy pleasures of those entertainers.
Gunday is helped by the fact that the angry young men whose story it tells are played by, well, young men. When twenty-somethings play these slightly juvenile characters, with their brash thoughtlessness and their cocksure swagger and their love-at-first-sight nonsense, the proceedings are a sight more amusing, and less embarrassing, than when middle-aged actors play the same sort of part, squeezed into the same sort of clothes, making eyes and passes at the same women, and beating up the same passel of goons, but with much less energy and ease. Ranveer and Arjun are both great fun to watch when they are together, even they both have been directed, sometimes to comic effect, to growl and grimace through dialogue that doesn't quite merit that level of intensity. Arjun, I suspect, isn't a particularly good actor yet. He delivers many of his lines in a half-done way that makes you wonder if he's really thinking about what he's saying. But he acquits himself nicely when he gets to work those sleepy eyes and that charmingly manic grin. Ranveer is better. We already know he can pull off the goofy bits, but he brings to his character (character sketch, really, since neither role is written with much nuance or shading) both a quiet sense of decency and a degree of coiled tension. I was reminded, from time to time, by his performance (and his painted-on pants) of a young Vinod Khanna.
Gunday also benefits from a tremendous antagonist in the form of Irrfan, who, in his cameo as a cop hot on the boys' trail, expectedly steals every scene he's in with his silky menace and his delicious way of making his lines both hilarious and potent with threat. He's clearly having a whale of a time, as is Priyanka Chopra, spectacular here in a series of gorgeous Dhakai sarees. Her performance here as the sort of woman who reduces men to roshmalai is evidence that the actor is immensely watchable when she drops the simpering, insubstantial ingenue act she unfortunately favors all too often, and aims for a more grown-up brand of sex appeal.
Gunday is by no means an essential entry into the modern masala canon, but it isn't a lazy cash-grab either. It's light on its feet and stylish and never ugly. Zafar cribs, with the proper degree of both respect and good humor, from sources he understands and has genuine affection for, instead of cynically and clumsily appropriating tropes and devices from South Indian films. Do I wish it did more with its resources and went further with its themes, that it delivered more completely on all of its narrative promise? I do. Did I still want to whistle admiringly a couple of times? Yep.
