My take on Shootout at Lokhandwala

This has been a busy week particularly with regard to my film viewing schedules. Started with Life in a Metro which should have been named Sexual Life in a Metro as all Anurag Basu did was dwell on sleazy underbelly of corporate culture and human relationships. Fair enough, to each his own. The other film I watched was Shootout at Lokhandwala. Given a choice between romance and guns, I’d go for guns any day. The film comes hot on the heels of the Sohrabuddin Sheikh fake encounter case grabbing headlines and eyeballs in the media. Less importantly are the Khwaja Yunus custodial death case and another fake encounter case in Gujarat that of Javed Sheikh who was gunned down in cold blood by the Rajasthan and Gujarat police in 2004. All three cases are preceded by a long and sordid history of fake encounter killings and the people with blood on their hands are the usual suspects – the police and the armed forces. Kashmir has seen the worst encounters over the past many years. Some of them find publicity and media coverage and become iconic while the rest (and the numbers are staggering) remain stacked in the dusty alleys of the establishment.

Was the Maya Dolas encounter in 1991 a real one? The Bombay High Court ruled in favour of the Anti-Terrorism squad being led by Aftab Ahmad Khan, which planned and executed the whole operation. Human rights activists and citizen’s group thought on the contrary. The encounter they said was a set-up. Khan had been on the D-gang payroll and had been sounded off after Dolas got too big for his boots. The families of the five men who were killed (and according to Shootout…quite brutally at that) petitioned the court saying that their children were killed for a crime they did not commit. However, all records (I have done some research on this) state that Dolas was indeed an extortionist who fell on the wrong side of Big Bhai in Dubai and was killed in a police encounter which involved loads 327 policemen and sophisticated weaponry and put the lives of close to 102 men, women and children living in the heavily populated Lokhandwala area on 16 November 1991 in danger.

The film does not provide answers to this vexing question. But is it supposed to? I don’t know. It is a film-director’s take on an incident, which has long been lauded as the longest encounter ever in the annals of the Mumbai Police. In portions, the screenplays veers towards hero-worship of the police officers involved in the operation, there are other sequences where the film-maker makes an attempt to provide a humane face to otherwise ruthless gangsters. It is much like a see-saw. The film begins with three large blood stains on the lane in front of Swati Building, the residential block which had housed the Maya and his boys for weeks and ends with the bloodied faces of the slain criminals. Was it correct to hound the men in the fashion that the Mumbai police chose to follow? The question is raised over and over again by a television reporter (played by Diya Mirza) fuelling an ideological and ethical debate.

My only problem with the film is the unnecessary and useless song and dance sequences and characters like the bar dancer (Aarti Chhabria) and Bua (Tusshar Kapoor). Kapoor not only failed to portray the sharpshooter to any devastating effect, his command over dialogues was grotesque. He should probably only stick to comic roles and leave the gangsta flicks to Vivek Oberoi. It was nice to see him come back into his own after the searing role in Company. He is superb as Mayabhai, the young extortionist who rebels against the D-Company. Rohit Roy is decent enough in a small role while Shabbir Ahluwalia, Ekta Kapoor’s blue-eyed boy makes a foray into Bollywood as RC, the young associate who cannot get over the fact that he murdered a family in cold blood.

Scenes to die for? Quite a few. ACP Shamsher Khan kills one of Maya’s cohorts (played by Aditya Lakhia) in front of the media, police, and Lokhandwala residents. It is effective, gory, and sets the pace for the rest of the sequence. But again it is difficult to judge the tenor of the filmmaker’s ideological leanings (whether in favour of the police or ethics in general) from this one scene; however it does raise a few questions about the methods the police uses to bring criminals to its knees. At one level the film propagates the infallibility of the police’s patriotism while on the other it raises a few uncomfortable queries about the fact that criminals too need to be treated like human beings and have rightful access to the institutions of law and justice. The verbal duel between Maya and ACP Khan too is well-shot and modulated. Dutt is a model cop – uncorrupted, patriotic, and dedicated and he does a brilliant job of his role (as usual).

Yes, one more thing. The presence of just too many stars from the commercial pantheon pulled the film back a bit. But who could have played Maya better than Vivek Oberoi?