Baba Review

B for an A and a B for an A! BAAAAA-BAAAAAA!

The beedi surgically attached to his mouth, the shirts with the top hundred buttons missing, the expression of a cowboy who's just turned cowman... Rajnikant gets an intro that only befits a Rajinikant! Indeed, Baba lives up to all the hype that's been assiduously built over it - for about the first half an hour! What next? Oh sheesh - the tickets are being sold for nothing less than 100 bucks unless you booked them in 2001, so give 'em a break, will ya?

Scowling, snarling Beedi-man Baba is a vagrant sort who's an atheist despite the fact that his folks at home spend about two packets of agarbatti and three kgs of ghee everyday. Well, to you and me he may be an atheist, but to God, he's the loyal opposition. Anyway, when he's not roughing people up (he's a do-gooder, you see) or looking like something that could do with a dose of Dettol, he spouts all sorts of lines like "Gatham gatham" (the past is the past) and keeps doing that symbol thing (Baaaabaaaaa) with his scrawny hands. Basically, he's the sort who likes to leave clothes and weapons in a place that he can find easily.

The fun (or the lack of it) starts when Baba roughs up the son of the Deputy CM, thus pissing the latter off like nobody's business. The Deputy CM goes one step ahead and knocks down Baba's neighborhood. Baba just about gets ready to

whack the living daylights off that guy when his ma tells him to cut it out and act like a dog with a flea collar and a rabies injection. Baba obliges and doesn't get any more hyper.

In the meantime, Lady L'Amour Manisha Koirala tells Baba to piss off 'coz she thinks that he's ain't worth her time and lard. And at this moment when Baba's stock's hit lower than a snake's belly, he gets shown the WAY by a madman who leads him to the original Baba (all Shirdi Sai and Puttaparthi fans please sit down - you'll all get your turn), who grants him 6 wishes (or was it seven?) to prove to him that there indeed is a God and that mebbe it was high time that Baba cleaned up his act.

To test drive the wishes, Baba launches out, and in the bargain squanders about 4 of them. What he does with the rest of them forms about the crux of the flick, which goes on for the next 21,372 minutes.

Just when you thought you saw your grave yawning in boredom, the flick picks up, and then moodily drops all over again. And then for the final insult, after yellowing our fingers with popcorn, we are, like a pair of pants, let down in the second half.

Baba as a flick comes nowhere close to a brainstorm. At best it can be described as a light drizzle. Like they say, in theory there is no difference between theory and practice but in practice there is. Putting that axiom to use, the movie did have a good idea (the wishes part and all), but then, in true filmi style, someone botched it up beyond recognition.

Rajini is suspiciously untouched by age (I wish I could say the same about his hair) and remains the coolest. But he puts Hitler to shame with all that political propaganda in the flick! Clap, clap, clap, very impressive, Rajini, yeah! I'll remember to vote for you in the next polls!

But what's the deal with Manisha Koirala? She looks as if she's just about gonna trip over the cordless phone. After Company, this flick is an insult to her, and her expression looks like she's just flunked a blood test!

Anyway, as far as the flick goes, yeah, it'll murder some time... yeah, Rajini fans rejoice, he is and remains the hippest... yeah, we wish that they really had played down the hype..., and yeah, they can't measure the intelligence of this flick (the scales don't go that low!).