Rudraksh (2004)

Posted on Jan 11, 2006 under Fantasy |

Written and directed by Mani Shankar
Starring
- Sanjay Dutt
- Bipashi Basu
- Sunil Shetty
- Isha Koppikar
- Kabir Bedi

As I take these first few tentative forays into the world of Bollywood movies, it’s heartening to find that there are some universals which cross the cultural boundaries of world cinema. Watching Mani Shankar’s Rudraksh allowed me to confirm a rule of thumb which I had previously formulated from watching Western movies:

The more hats a given individual wears, the more chance there is that the movie will run off the rails.

Here, Shankar writes, directs, edits, and provides the copious CGI effects. Given his near-absolute creative control, there apparently was no one with enough pull to offer him a much-needed second opinion on many of his creative choices. There was no one to say, “Mani, this part really doesn’t make sense” or “Mani, you’re focusing too much on stuff that doesn’t really matter” or “Mani, some of this CGI work looks like it was cribbed from a Nintendo 64.”

I will warn you that a fragmented and incoherent a movie is harder to summarize in review. As long as a movie has a structured plot — though it be stale and cliche-ridden — I can indicate with broad strokes how the story progresses. When a movie meanders aimlessly, though, I can’t easily touch on the high points because there are no high points. Damn you, Mani Shankar, for making my review work harder!

Summer home of the Zardoz clan.

Let’s start out with some background, narrated by the sonorous voice of Amitabh Bachchan (I’m told he’s really really famous in India): Way back in time, good divine guy Rama vanquished the evil Ravana, grand pooh-bah of the demons. But demons never really die, and ancient texts say that Ravana will be back someday, mainly because he left behind… a rudraksh.

Given that the word “rudraksh” was used about a billion times before one was ever shown in the movie, I had to pause and do some research so that I’d have a chance at following the action. Here are the results of my research:

- It’s pronounced “ruh-DRAHKSH.”

- It’s a wrinkled seed about the size and shape of a prune.

- The word means “Shiva’s tear”; the seed comes from a holy tree, and is thus considered sacred and protection against evil. The holier the rudraksha (I believe that’s the proper plural), the less they’re supposed to be handled.

There. I just saved you four minutes of googling.

Narration over (and how a holy item could be a calling-card for the king of the demons unexplained), we go to a computer-generated facsimile of Sri Lanka in 1990 (bet you didn’t know that Sinhalese ruins cover every square foot of Sri Lanka, did you?). There, at an archaeological dig, we meet the Neanderthalic labor foreman Bhuria (Sunil Shetty), and his hottie girlfriend Lali (Isha Koppikar). Bhuria is a thief and a brute, and thus is the perfect person to have on hand when a huge statue of a horned skull is uncovered. The statue has a mesmerizing effect on Bhuria, and he spends hours staring at it. Then, guided by it, he uncovered another small artifact which turns out to be a missing piece which fits into the statue’s forehead. Once it’s inserted, there’s lightning and CGI-created auras all around, and out pops the rudraksh in question, wrapped in a helix of golden wire. The archaeological team, seeing what looks like fireworks going off around the statue, comes and siezes the rudraksh before Bhuria can do anything but burn his hand attempting to grasp it. But the rudraksh has its hooks deep into Bhuria’s psyche (and given him permanent blue contact lenses), and he murders the entire archaeological team to gain the rudraksh back.

Fast-forward to a couple of other times in the 1990s, as Bhuria and Lali travel around the Far East, causing chaos wherever they go, thanks to the demonic influence which is slowly bringing Bhuria up to the level of evolution enjoyed by the rest of the human race. Along the way, there’s a puzzling bit about the two of them working in Mumbai, with Lali having been brainwashed by the rudraksh into believing that she’s a contract killer. Huh? Never mind; it’s just one of a whole passel of throwaway plotlines which are barely mentioned and never explored.

“I wonder how much one of these would go for on eBay?”

Finally, by the beginning on the 21st century, Bhuria has become classy enough to trim his hair and wear white suits, and he starts seeking another individual to help him exploit the demon power and bring about the apocalyptic return of Raksha.

And then the opening credits roll… nineteen minutes into the movie. Oh, dear. As you may guess, “pacing problems” gain this movie a lot of demerits.

So. Since we just spent almost twenty minutes getting to know the bad guy, let’s spend a comparable chunk of time finding out about the good guy. There’s this quack-busting scientific team led by young and nubile Dr. Gayatri (Bipasha Batru) — as Indian as Indian can be, but nonetheless a U.S. citizen working under the aegis the University of California — debunking phony swamis in India and seeking anyone with real, demonstrable powers. She’s found only one: a selfless mystic named Varun (Sanjay Dutt), who spends his time healing the crippled, blindfolding himself for karate practice, and staring at the world through sedate, tired eyes from beneath a pretty obvious wig.

Gayatri is pretty obviously taken with Varun, so she pursues him in her brash, pushy way (gee, no wonder they made her an American), and does what any girl does when trying to win over a holy man: Invites him to a nightclub where the entertainment is provided by pole-dancing cowgirls. Gayatri even joins the girls on stage for a song and dance. Yes, I know, musical numbers are a necessity in Bollywood features, but even by those cultural standards I can’t believe that this scene didn’t stick out like a sore thumb. It contributes nothing to the relationship between Varun and Gayatri, or any other facet of the plot; its sole reason to exist is to provide a musical number which is entirely at odds with the tenor of the rest of the movie. And in a movie that’s already overlong for the amount of story to be told, it’s yet more forgettable padding. (You also have to love the translated lyrics as the overpainted girls are gyrating on stage: “Love is godliness / By God’s design…”)

So. After many scenes of exploring Varun’s life and such, Gayatri has him in her lab while he goes into a trance to “activate his deep cortex” (and see a vision of Ganesh, the elephant god). I put that in quotes because, frankly, Gayatri doesn’t impress me as knowing what the hell she’s doing. She even trots out that old chestnut about man only using a fraction of his brain — although instead of the usual 10% figure (which I consider to be accurate only for those who repeat such twaddle), she knocks it down to 1%! Stupidity inflation? I dunno. Varun explains the astral plane to Gayatri as being analogous to quantum physics, and says things like, “God is a divine Internet.” In return, she drags him into yet another experiment: Healing a legless madman (Raj Zutshi) who’s been babbling in an asylum for over a decade. This is the first inkling that a plot may be underway, as we’ve already seen the madman in question, when Bhuria attacked him years before in one of his riots an sent him into the path of a car. When Varun tries to mindmeld with him, he finds himself on a suspended platform in the clouds of the “quantum domain,” confronting Bhuria. Gee, only 45 minutes into the movie, and we finally have some contact between protagonist and antagonist.

“You really ought to try my conditioner.”

After rebuffing Bhuria’s offer to join together, suddenly they both have swords. And haircuts. (Heck, Varun gets himself an entirely new hairline.) And they proceed to leap and slash at each other, the scene punctuated by intermittent digital slo-mo which was intended more to cover for Sanjay Dutt’s obvious lack of martial arts training than for any artistic reason. The bout ends inconclusively, Bhuria having demonstrated that his astral fu is much stronger than Varun’s.

Because Gayatri’s a scientist, she does counterintuitive things like playing back a recording of the now-cured madman’s former babblings for a rat to hear. (It takes an uncommon, visionary mind to make great advances in science, you know.) Now, try to follow this: The babbling makes the rat (poorly rendered in CGI) stand stock still with its eyes glowing. (It also starts to change the rat’s DNA, a fact which is easily detected by equipment Gayatri just happens to have sitting around her lab.) Then staring at the rat makes Gayatri’s assistant Suzy (Agnes Darenius) all possessed; she leaves in the middle of the night, ascends in a helicopter, and meets Bhuria and Lali on the astral plane. The next day, she returns and attacks Gayatri and her other assistants with really bad wire fu, and only Varun’s intervention saves them. Bhuria is mostly trying to draw Varun out, because if he doesn’t, we REALLY won’t have a plot.

Before he does anything remotely proactive, though, Varun stops to give Gayatri a massage, to “heal” her from the itty-bitty bruises she got during Susie’s attack. (Cue Musical Number #2. At least there’s no pole-dancing this time, but there are dancing cavegirls.) Then Varun takes the women on horseback across an embarrassingly-bad CGI landscape to the monastery run by his even-more-mystical father (Kabir Bedi). Dad analyzes the babblings tape and discovers a demonic mantra within it, a “spiritual virus” which could only have come from the rudraksh of Ravana. He doesn’t get to contribute much more than that before Bhuria enters as a black whirlwind and kills Dad.

Varun uses his psychic powers to replay the scene, then to enter into Bhuria’s mind and see glimpses of his past, like his eyes turning blue and his being tortured by Sri Lankan police. Sri Lanka! At last, someplace to look for this dude! He takes a trip (with Gayatri along like a booger he just can’t flick off) and interrogates the only officer still around who remembers Bhuria. Varun makes a big deal out of the fact that the version of the story the officer tells doesn’t match what he saw in vision. Like every big deal in this movie, nothing ever comes of it.

“There can be only… um… fewer than two!”

Because the officer said something about Bhuria having been at a cave 11km out of town, Gayatri and her assistants go exploring and find the demon skull statue there. they evidently piss it off, because huge chunks of styrofoam — excuse me, stone start falling all around them, pinning them without even scratching their shorts-clad legs. Varun arrives just in time to free them by using The Force, and to rebury the statue via a prayer to Shiva.

From there he goes to the closed archaeological site, where the old guard who was there way back when still hangs out. The guard helpfully tells the entire story of Bhuria and the rudraksh, accompanied by the five-minute version of the first ten minutes of the movie. (Footage so nice, we watch it twice!) By this time, though, Bhuria is getting impatient, I guess; if Varun’s detective work proceeds at this pace, it’ll take him fourteen years to track Bhuria down. So instead Bhuria somehow makes scraps of paper drift by on the wind with messages for Varun: “I’m in Mumbai, dumbass! Come find me, already!”

By the time Varun and Gayatri get to Mumbai (with Varun having cut his hair short, as in the astral battle), there are riots going on all over the place. Riots? Yeah, Bhuria’s been sending out the demonic mantra through radio and TV all over the world, so there are global riots as the demonic influence makes itself known. How is he able to do this? Is he a broadcast exec? These are facets of what I call the “shadow plot,” i.e., the story we might have been following if we hadn’t been watching inconsequential sideroads instead. In any event, Varun leaves Gayatri at the foot of the Radio City Towers where Bhuria is waiting — his exact words are “This is the end of the road for you, baby” — and ascends the elevator to where Bhuria is dressed like a disco daddy, presiding over the evil disco dance that Lali is apparently using to send the evil mantra out around the world. (I just reviewed that sentence three times. I swear it’s completely accurate, though it makes not a lick of sense.)

And so, the final battle. Or rather, the penultimate one: Varun fails miserably in defeating Bhuria, and as his soul is hurtling toward the netherworld, the ghost of his father appears to tell him how to defeat Bhuria: Take the power of the rudraksh as his own, kick Bhuria’s ass, then give up the demon’s power. Simple, right? So Varun chants the demonic mantra, comes back to life, grabs the rudraksh (which never let Bhuria touch it at all), gets some reptilian contact lenses, and proceeds to beat the snot out of Bhuria in an overlong scene that involves tons of bad wire fu, low-end CGI, and massive quoting of Hindi scripture at each other. The end.

Everybody do the demon disco!

Yes, I know. This is a long review. It was a long movie too, coming in at almost two and a half hours, but for all the stuff that happens, surprisingly little happens. Varun qualifies as one of the most inert protagonists ever; if Bhuria weren’t drawing him out at every juncture, he’d still be sitting somewhere crosslegged, starting with that blank expression in which he specializes. Huge sections of the movie go around in circles without contributing anything to the story — superhuge sections, really, when you realize that the character of Gayatri is superfluous for everything except a couple of the dance scenes. (This despite her trying to make an impact by being a pushy, obsessive bitch. I guess you can still be a heroine if you have great legs.) The CGI effects simply aren’t ready for prime time, and the sheer quantity of them (used every time someone goes in and out of a trance or does anything mystical) exacerbates their inadequacy. It’s a bloated, formless nebula of a movie, lacking in enough mass to coalesce into anything of substance. Stripped of the vapid mysticism and convenient mythology (which, according to Chris, takes great liberties with real Hindu theology) and shorn of the overlong expository sequences, it’s a movie about a couple of guys with changing hairstyles fighting over a gold-wrapped prune.