Dinesh Kamath’s column ‘New movie-releases in Navi Mumbai’ (Shahid, Escape Plan, Boss, Captain Phillips and Vanshvel) that was published in Newsband

New movie-releases in Navi Mumbai

By Dinesh Kamath

Shahid

Shahid is a 2013 biographical Hindi film directed by Hansal Mehta and produced by Anurag Kashyap. It is based on the life of lawyer and human rights activist, Shahid Azmi, who was assassinated in 2010 in Mumbai.

The film is inspired by the murder of lawyer and human rights activist Shahid Azmi. It is a tale of this short but influential life. He had taken on the system on his own. He was killed at 32, but there was so much he had achieved before that there was a story to tell there.

Shahid is a biopic of Azmi’s battle with the India’s justice system, in which many of those arrested are branded as terrorists before being found guilty by a court. The film explores his past, which included a short stint in a militant training camp in Pakistan-administered Kashmir and seven years in Delhi’s Tihar Jail on charges under India’s terror laws. He was acquitted on appeal by the Supreme Court.

The focus then moves to Azmi’s seven-year career as a lawyer, during which he secured 17 acquittals. The crux of the film rests on two of his most high-profile cases where he acted for the defense; the Mumbai train bombings on 11 July 2006, and 11 November 2008, Mumbai attacks.

Shahid Azmi’s is a story of his will and determination which surpassed his circumstances. Under no circumstances did Azmi give up his will to fight. He lived an ordinary life, with extraordinary conviction to do what he believed was right.

The film  has Raj Kumar Yadav as Shahid Azmi, Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub as Arif Azmi, Tigmanshu Dhulia as Maqbool Memon, K K Menon as War saab, Prabal Panjabi as Omar Sheikh, Prabhleen Sandhu as Mariam and Baljinder Kaur as Ammi.

Escape Plan

Escape Plan is a 2013 action thriller film starring Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jim Caviezel, 50 Cent, Vinnie Jones, Vincent D'Onofrio, and Amy Ryan. Escape Plan is being directed by Swedish filmmaker Mikael Håfström, and is written by Miles Chapman (screenplay) and Jason Keller (rewrite). The film will follow Stallone's character Ray Breslin, a structural engineer who is wrongly convicted of a crime, and is incarcerated in a prison of his own design, aided in his escape by his cellmate Rottmayer (Arnold Schwarzenegger).

In Escape Plan, Stallone plays Breslin, who’s an expert at breaking out of secure prisons (which figures, after all his previous experiences) and is “the best at what he does” according to the usual expositional dialogue. We get to witness his unique skills during a slickly put together opening sequence that shows how Breslin achieves what seem like impossible feats, using nothing more than patience, intelligence and, of course, the assistance of his trusty team.

Stallone plays a resourceful MacGyver-esque man whose government job involves going undercover in prisons to test security by attempting to break out. After being set up by some shady types, he finds himself in the world's most secret and secure prison with his 'safe words' and pleas to be released ignored by Jim Caviezel's sadistic, butterfly collecting warden Hobbs. His only hope is an alliance with Schwarzenegger's shrewd inmate Emil Rottmayer, but how far can he be trusted?

Once the two stars hook up to conspire against the nefarious powers, following a few good-natured bouts of physical and verbal sparring, the movie races along to a gripping climax laced with bullets, brawls and winning wisecracks.

Boss

Boss is a Bollywood action comedy masala film directed by Anthony D'Souza. The film will be produced by Cape of Good Films & Ashwin Varde Productions, and features Akshay Kumar, Mithun Chakraborty, Shiv Pandit, Aditi Rao Hydari and Ronit Roy in lead roles. It is apparently a remake of Malayalam movie Pokkiri Raja starring Mammotty, Prithviraj and Shriya Saran.

Akshay will be seen in a Haryanvi avatar in the film and presence of Mithun Chakraborty as his father in the film heightens the entertainment quotient. If that is not enough, the star will be seen doing jogging in a very peculiar style on truck tops. The film will see Akshay as kind-hearted Haryanavi gangster, apparently known as Boss, while Shiv Pandit will be seen as his younger brother. Danny Denzongpa is Akshay's mentor and Ronit Roy a ruthless police officer who is at loggerheads with the Boss. As far as glamour quotient is concerned, it will be added by Aditi Rao Hydari as the female lead.

In short, the film is about a beautiful relationship between a father and son, a very underplayed relationship.

The film has Akshay Kumar as Boss, Mithun Chakraborty as Satyakant Shastri, Shiv Pandit as Shiv, Ronit Roy as Ayushman Mathur, Aditi Rao Hydari as Ankita, Danny Denzongpa, Johnny Lever as Zorawar, Sanjai Mishra, Mukesh Tiwari, Parikshit Sahni, Sonakshi Sinha, Prabhudeva in a Special Appearance in song Hum Na Tode and Honey Singh in a Special Appearance in song Party All Night.

Captain Phillips

Captain Phillips is a 2013 American action thriller directed by Paul Greengrass and starring Tom Hanks. The film is a biopic of merchant mariner Captain Richard Phillips, who was taken hostage by pirates in the Indian Ocean during the Maersk Alabama hijacking in 2009.

The screenplay by Billy Ray is based upon the book, A Captain's Duty: Somali Pirates, Navy SEALs, and Dangerous Days at Sea (2010), by Richard Phillips with Stephan Talty. The film is produced by Scott Rudin, Dana Brunetti, and Michael De Luca.

The film has an interesting plot. Richard Phillips (Tom Hanks) is the captain of the American container ship MV Maersk Alabama, when in April 2009, it is hijacked off the coast of Somalia by a crew of Somali pirates led by Muse (Barkhad Abdi). Phillips endures a grueling ordeal, first on the ship, working to protect his crew, and then having been taken hostage, on a lifeboat.

The final fifteen minutes of Paul Greengrass's Captain Phillips are the most intense scenes. The film’s climax and catharsis are breathtaking. The final moments of Captain Phillips include a career-best acting moment from Tom Hanks.

The amazing thing is that Captain Phillips is based on a true story that most of the audience knows. That a story with a known ending can be so gripping — even sublime — is a testament both to the filmmakers' talents and film's inherent power to narrate real stories.

Thus Captain Phillips depicts the 2009 events surrounding the hijacking by Somali pirates of the Maersk Alabama and the subsequent kidnapping-for-ransom of the ship's merchant marine captain, Richard Phillips (Hanks). Aside from a puzzling stateside prologue in which Catherine Keener makes a brief cameo as Phillips' wife, the film takes place entirely at sea in the dangerous waters off the coast of Somalia.

The film is set mostly in confined, claustrophobic transportation spaces — a lifeboat and an airplane — with limited contact with the outside world. The film features largely unknown casts (aside from Hanks) and is made in a cinéma vérité style of gritty, jittery realism. It gets very loud — nay, cacophonous — in its final, heart-stopping minutes. And it showcases the violent clashes of cultures, as well as the might of the American military industrial complex.

Thus Captain Phillips is shown as engaged in a battle that acts as a proxy for a much larger, more complex existential collision. They are random airline passengers whose fates collide with those of bin Laden's recruits, or they are everyday sailors doing their jobs one minute and fending off warlord-employed Somali hijackers the next.

Vanshvel

Vanshvel is produced by Sunil Mankar, directed by Rajeev Patil and its star cast comprises Ankush Chaudhary, Kishore Kadam, Namrata Gaikwad and Sushant Shelar, Shantanu Gangane, Manisha Kelkar, Vidya Karanjikar, Usha Naik. Story is by Damodar Narayan Mankar, dialogues by Datta Patil, music by Amit Raj and genre of the film is Drama.

Vanshvel preaches that the country will last only if the family stays intact. The film does focus on the joys and woes of family life, but the director clarifies that the one-line idea that came from the producer was a very progressive one — ‘respect to women’. The film tries to convey the idea that women still don’t enjoy the equality and respect they deserve, because of the way our society and family have been structured. And, we also see families disintegrating, walls splitting up one household into two. The film tries to make sense of all this.

The issues in the film unfold in a very simple, easy way. It is an entertaining story at the end of the day. You will enjoy the film’s songs and the way the characters are developed.