Things that are wrong with movies like ‘Kick’.

I find it funny thinking that a movie about robbing the corrupt and helping the needy managed to rob over 370 crores from the common public.

I could be talking about any movie, but the above line is in context to Salman Khan’s Eid-Entertainer; ‘Kick’. It’s somehow difficult to digest watching a movie where a humongously rich actor collaborates with other monetary powerhouses to give an example of a common man taking up an impossible and probably life-threatening task of remanding the corrupt. I mean why pick a social message and spice it up enough for it to pass as entertainment? If you can’t fix the problems yourself, or be a part of the needed change, why address the issue in the first place? Why cash-in on people’s emotions,  use ‘star-power’ and not send across a suitable message?

This movie isn’t the only one to do so, Jai Ho, Sivaji-the boss, and numerous other movies from the South Indian Film Industry tackle issues of corruption and explain that one man,  if pushed far enough to the limit can unleash his true power and channel his rage to flip over the entire ‘corrupt system’.

But that can’t really happen. Someone even voicing a similar thought could be vanished from existence in no time. The audience these days that watch such movies are smart enough to realise that. That’s why we never see such instances of the common man trying to one-up the corrupt. Or maybe that may have happened but he was successfully vanished.

The audiences have realised that the actor in the movie is a super-power and only the characters he portrays is strong enough to achieve the impossible ‘uprising’. Maybe that’s why Rajinikanth is considered as a god and is worshipped, because they know noone else can convincingly act out such ‘super-characters’ who achieve the unheard.

The problem only lies in the fact that such movies have become a mainstay in Hindi Cinema. A trend that every modern-day actor has tried to cash into. There is no one actor to be blamed for this.

Hindi Cinema has been run on ‘common men’ with ‘hidden power of belief/rage/younameit’ who beat insurmountable odds. This approach has been overused from the 70s and it has somehow evolved to ‘leave-your-brains-at-home’ entertainers.

But then watching a two-and-a-half hour movie that exudes in every scene what I’ve written above , actually managed to stir up these thoughts and become the very foundation of this piece. This is even funnier because the makers of the movie would’ve never possibly imagined this effect of their ‘entertainer’.

This rant might come across as pointless to certain readers, and maybe it is. But I had scribbled this quite a while ago, and I felt it had to see the light of the day! I’m pretty sure somebody out there would agree with my views on the topic.