Mithunda has done it again. And as a helpless reviewer with a job to do, I can
only wish he hadn't. I've never failed to wonder how such movies such as his get
made, bought and watched. Khataron Ke Khiladi offers no answers. I can only repeat
that Mithunda has done it again. He has managed to make another film that is thoroughly
illogical, totally unwatchable, and entertaining only if you are in a mood to
poke fun at every scene.
It all begins in a village (it is left to you to decide what kind of a village, 'coz later in the movie you have a bimbo prancing around in the "village" in very cosmopolitan clothes) where the wealthy Thakur Vijay Pratap Singh (Raj Babbar) is busy making everyone's life miserable (including yours, but this is just the beginning). His illegitimate but noble brother Ajay Pratap Singh, whose character, by the way, is also played by Raj Babbar (forgive the constant interruptions, but I do wonder how younger brothers, illegitimate or otherwise, end up looking exactly like their older siblings - maybe the producers didn't want yet another actor on their payroll), is an injured captain who has some bones to pick with him.
Ali (Kiran Kumar) is a school-teacher who, along with his wife Shakina, seems to be the self-appointed guardian angel of all the foolish villagers. He, too, manages, without much effort, to make an enemy of the Thakur. Just as you start wondering if you are watching the wrong movie, as there is no sign of Mithunda, he crashes into the scene, rewarding your patience with a song (homophonous to ugh!).
It would take forever to tell you the story, mainly because our writer seems to be of a highly adventurous disposition. He runs wild with the script, explores different paths, abandons many halfway, explores some more, then does some more abandoning. All this exploring and abandoning leads nowhere, especially since the paths are not roads not taken before but well treaded on by tons of filmmakers tons of times.
Anyway, the crux, if you can call it that, is that Mithun and his three buddies (the producers have realized that Mithun cannot carry the film on his shoulders) are the kinds who love gambling (literally and otherwise) with danger. This is noticed by Captain Ajay Pratap Singh and he decides to make use of it. He tells them that a treasure is buried under some land in the village, and persuades them to dig for it.
There's no treasure, of course. Ajay Pratap is just making sure that the barren land is well dug up, so it can become productive for the villagers who have been cheated into possessing it (beats me how you can make barren land productive by digging it!). Anyway, this part of the story is promptly forgotten when the four come across something more interesting, like the girl in the cosmo clothes.
Another bimbo turns up claiming Mithun as her husband, thus inspiring some shockingly ridiculous dream sequences. The story then goes completely haywire, with some terrible inanities that assault your intelligence and plague your senses. It turns out that Mithun and his gang, who, by the way, have some really strange accents (if the drift was on national integration, it wasn't a very successful one), are prisoners who've broken out of prison. The movie ends with the good guys bashing up the bad, but by that time the word "good" really cannot be applied to Mithun.
The direction is shockingly careless, with Tamil bills in a Hindi-speaking village, motorbikes that change make and color, and unconvincing fight sequences. The movie is the epitome of discontinuity, jumping from scene to scene like a confused, demented, wounded kangaroo.
Khataron Ke Khiladi is another one of those movies to (dis)grace the B-grade film
scene in our already over-polluted industry. You really shouldn't encourage such
behavior by attempting to watch it.