Some people have all the luck and some just don't. And rarely is anything more
unpredictable that the favors of Lady Luck. Ironically, the male lead often repeats
this very thought throughout the movie - a dialogue that is still remembered in
this film-crazy land of ours.
Aatish, when it was first released, was much ahead of its times. The plot, though well beaten, did have an interesting twist, which inspired so many other not-so -successful movies to follow. The story is a run-of-the-mill vengeance thriller, with two brothers taking two diverse routes to the same objective. Baba (Dutt), the elder and more flamboyant, takes to crime, and the younger Amit (Atul Agnihotri) is the upright cop, which he goes on to play in so many other movies.
But the story goes beyond this main theme, and its most memorable moments are the unique friendship of Baba and Karim (Aditya Panscholi). The cast was so perfectly suited to the characters onscreen that the director had won half the battle there itself. The female cast have nothing much to do except sing songs and sob in the background, as romance is almost totally sacrificed to develop a full-blooded (excuse the pun) action flick.
The mainstay of the movie is its action, and there is a lot of that around, with a lot of money being used up to generate the required effect. The use of spectacular looking guns went down, surprisingly, very well with the audience.
The violence, though a trite overplayed, was exceedingly well conceived, and did not seem out of place in the plot. Sanjay Gupta really made it big with this film as an action-film maker, but fortune never looked at him with this same kindness ever after. His other films never inspired the thrills of Aatish, and never did as well.
What was exceptional about Aatish was that it was the father to so many stereotypes. It type-casted, with its success, many careers in Bollywood and established the trend that followed.
But that was then. Releasing it again now, after so many similar looking films,
is just a case of stretching one's luck too far.