Film: “Runway”
Cast: Amarjeet Shukla, Tulip Joshi, Lucky Ali, Deepal Shaw, Shahwar Ali, Sharat Saxena, Vida Samadzai
Director: Suniel-Praful
Rating: *
When a filmmaker doesn’t have any story to tell, he tries to perk up the narrative by using jump cuts, freeze frames and other technical wizardry - last year it was seen in “Woodstock Villa”, this year it’s in “Runway”.
“Runway” sets the message right at the very beginning that it is an exercise in futility.
Amarjeet Shukla, the lead protagonist in the film, becomes a contract killer to save the life of his lady love Deepal Shaw, who is dying due to drug usage. He comes in touch with people like Sharat Saxena who plays underworld English speaking kingpin who wears dark shades, is surrounded by those 80s style left over blue-n-white drums and announces - ‘I am not interested in your love story; I want brave people’.
Amarjeet’s friend, who introduces him to the Don also warns him - ‘He is a man of commitment, so be careful.’
It’s just that the ‘man of commitment’ himself is nowhere to be seen in the entire second half as his henchman pairs up with Amarjeet to do rest of the killing. Worse, one doesn’t quite understand who is killing whom and what’s the purpose behind that?
So Amarjeet presses the trigger for the first time and just when he gets hold on a fake passport to fly back into India, courtesy Tulip, he decides to skip his flight and return to the mean streets.
By the way, Tulip plays a girl in a dance bar who ‘cannot be afforded’, as stated by one of her junior colleagues. She sings ‘bhojpuri’ songs, speaks English, lives in Mauritius, fears a Pakistani don and falls in love with an Indian. A true ambassador of globalisation.
Talking about Mauritius, one needs to give a rap on the knuckles of the person who created that fancy software that plays on Amarjeet’s laptop. Mauritius is spelt as ‘Muritus’ along with at least a couple of more English errors that is embarrassingly displayed on the big screen. Moreover, the film’s tagline ‘Love Among Gun Shots’ isn’t syntactically correct either! But then who would have cared about such minor things when there are bigger and far more glaring loopholes in the films.
So what one gets to see is biggest contract killer in the entire globe, Lucky Ali, driving a bike on the streets of Mauritus and firing openly on poor Amarjeet.
If that wasn’t heroic enough, he also removes his helmet, proudly flaunts his revolver and keeps searching him on foot even as the entire marketplace makes way for him. He enters people’s households and hotel rooms unannounced, kills them in quick successions, always leaves Tulip unscathed and misses his target whenever Amarjeet comes in sight.
However, one chance and Amarjeet shoots him in a split second motion. Quite a feat, especially with a Mauritian super cop, who announces that ‘he won’t allow gang war to break in his city’, is left hardly impressed that a ‘common Indian’ has managed to do what Interpol couldn’t for all these years.
At the end, he turns out to be even more powerful as he knocks down Amarjeet with three (or were they four?) bullets. Well, not bad.
Now if only he would have found him at the airport in the film’s beginning itself and done the honours there and then. That would have been some relief for a poor viewer who all this while was thinking of ‘running away’ from this trash affair.
Source
The 1960s and ’70s were tumultuous times in the United States. The country was fighting an unpopular war in Vietnam that was instigating a wave of protests. In 1970, tensions came to a fever pitch when tragedy struck on one college campus. On May 4, members of the Ohio National Guard shot into a crowd of antiwar protestors at Kent State University, killing four students and wounding nine. To understand the context of the tension, let’s sum up the background on the war. Vietnam, which had recently fought for its independence from France in the 1940s and ’50s, had split into the Communist North (Viet Cong) and non-Communist South, which sought a more democratic government. The United States had gradually increased its support for South Vietnam in order to prevent Communism from spreading in Asia. Richard Nixon won the 1968 presidential election based partly on his promise of Vietnamization — transferring combat duties from U.S. soldiers to the South Vietnamese. On April 30, 1970, President Nixon seemed to be betraying such promises about reducing U.S. involvement in the war when he announced that he sent troops into Cambodia, where the Viet Cong had its headquarters. Opponents of the war interpreted Nixon’s announcement as a step backward, and it immediately prompted antiwar protests across the country, especially on college campuses. MilitaryChannel.com: Vietnam War Quiz Kent State University in Kent, Ohio, was one such campus where tense protests were held. The campus was a relatively unlikely setting for the dramatic events that unfolded over the span of four days leading up to the tragedy. Compared to nearby Ohio State University, the Kent State student body was generally less liberal and more blue-collar [source: Lytle]. However, it’s thought that outside agitators helped escalate the violence and intensity of the protests. As protests became more heated, the Ohio National Guard was summoned to Kent. These guardsmen became the center of the controversy for their decision to fire into the crowd. Many of these young men were no older than the student protesters and had joined the Guard in order to dodge the draft. But the real story of what happened at Kent State begins a few days before the tragic shootings took place. It begins on Friday, May 1 — the day after President Nixon made his announcement about sending troops into Cambodia.