Movie Review: SARKAR (2005) – Remake Of Hollywood’s GODFATHER
Another Tuesday (where I am) and another old school post written by the me. 🙂 I recently saw RAKHTA CHARITRA, directed by Ram Gopal Varma, (review coming soon) and wanted to put up an old review I did of another classic of his. RGV’s direct tribute to the man himself, Francis Ford Coppola came with his Indianized version of THE GODFATHER in the form of SARKAR. Seriously.
Rating: 5 Out Of 5 Stars
Mumbai, the underworld and criminals are topics that make Ram Gopal Varma drool with excitement. You won’t find exotic foreign locations and bright, fluffy song and dance numbers in his movies. But despite his limited range of themes and low budget movies, Ramu is still considered one of the best film makers in Bollywood today. What his movies have, that others lack, is realism. He’ll make a movie on an everyday occurrence, but it’ll become the most riveting thing you’ve ever seen. It might be for this reason that Ram Gopal Varma is the one director in Bollywood who has either created careers, or revived them. He’s discovered people like Urmilla, Fardeen Khan, Vivek Oberoi, and many more while he’s jump started the careers of others like Ajay Devgan, Nana Patekar, Saif Ali Khan, and oh so many more. And not just actors, but RGV’s been mentor to many others in Bollywood who are making their presence felt in movies like KAAL, SALAAM NAMASTE and DUS. This time, RGV joins with the most talented, not to mention famous, father-son combination in Bollywood to give us his tribute to a great cinematic classic, THE GODFATHER.
The surprise element in SARKAR ends up being, Tanisha, sister of Kajol. Among major superstars like Abhishek, Kay Kay and most of all Amitabh, Tanisha is able to make herself stand out with a subtle performance of a young bubbly girl taken into Sarkar’s family after the death of her father. After movies like POPCORN KHAO! MAST HO JAO it’s a relief to see Tanisha in more, sane movies that actually end up making sense, unlike the one mentioned above.
A lot of Bollywood movies are ripped off from Hollywood movies. Now
they’ll defend themselves by saying that their movies are ‘based on’ or ‘inspired by’ certain Hollywood movies, but not ‘copied’; even though they end up being a scene-by-scene and word-for-word rip-off of Hollywood movies. But once more Ram Gopal Varma stands out from the rest of the Bollywood sheep and openly admits that SARKAR is based on the GODFATHER. He goes further to label the beginning of the movie with a dedication of his tribute, as a filmmaker, to the classic that THE GODFATHER is, and to the man Francis Ford Coppola himself.
Being Ram Gopal Varma and Amitabh Bachchan’s first movie together is enough for SARKAR to make it into the history books, but being what I would call RGV’s masterpiece is what puts SARKAR over the top. SARKAR has been so brilliantly done by Ramu that it can only be described as an explosion contained in a bottle with cracks forming as it tries to expand beyond its confines. There are rumours of a sequel, but we’ll see what materializes… till then just remember:
“There are no Rights and Wrongs, only Power.” — Sarkar
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