Aankhen (2002)

First of all, the song 'Phatela Jeb' is my jam and I have no choice but to respect this movie for blessing us with it. Secondly, this movie only felt like a thriller in the last 45 minutes or so. Why does Bollywood feel the need to insert songs everywhere? Literally none of the songs (except 'Phatela Jeb' of course) contributed anything to the plot, and made the film more insufferable than it necessarily had to be. To be effective, a thriller must be fast and pacy, which this one is most certainly not.

Thirdly, Amitabh Bachchan had such a massive Raichand hangover from K3G (yuck) which had just released a year earlier, and trust me, it gets on your nerves real quick. I also did not appreciate the mental health representation here- early on in the film, it's explicitly stated that Amitabh's character is schizophrenic and a genius and a stickler for rules and my god what follows afterwards is such a tired narrative that you wish you could forget that he is schizophrenic and that they did not spell it out for you in the beginning itself. Also, he's referred to as a "wild animal" multiple times, so that was lovely. And, let me not fail to mention that Amitabh's character never fails to mention his surname, Rajput, because even though Bollywood might rarely (if ever) address the issue of caste, it will still be casteist as fuck. 

The only reason I survived this movie was the romance between Sushmita Sen and Arjun Rampal. It was sweet and made me smile. Paresh Rawal was full comedy here and lowkey saved some parts of the movie, but he also cracked a r*pe joke which left a very disgusting taste in my mouth. Canadian Kumar (no, I will not refer to him in any other way) reminded me that even though he is quite overrated and underwhelming now, back when he was good, he was GOOD. Sigh. Also Sushmita was styled amazingly throughout the movie, and I have so many screenshots of her outfits for future reference. 

Even though the ending was quite amazing, I still feel sad about it for reasons I can't disclose because I don't want to give spoilers. And finally, I really just want to hit Amitabh's character with a slipper. 

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