Film review: Coolie, starring Amitabh Bachchan, Rati Agnihotri, Rishi Kapoor (2024)

ISSUE DATE: Dec 31, 1983 | UPDATED: Jul 3, 2014 12:20 IST

With a string of box-office blockbusters behind him - including Amar Akbar Anthony, Dharamveer, Naseeb and Suhaag - director Manmohan Desai can rightly claim to have a special understanding of audience tastes.

There is, however, he modestly insists, no sure-fire formula for a hit: "It is 75 per cent luck and 25 per cent my trade secret." And elaborating this secret, he says: "Just as food requires salt and spices in the right proportion to make it tasty, I try to put the right amount of everything in my film." In his latest movie Coolie, though, the master entertainer seems to have got his recipe wrong and forgotten the meat for the masala.

Even before its release. Coolie had become part of film folklore as the movie in which Amitabh Bachchan was seriously injured before making a spectacular recovery (India Today August 31, 1982). To get maximum mileage, the dramatic punch scene shot has been frozen twice and a subtitle announces that this is the historic moment when disaster struck temporarily, on July 25,1982.

After Bachchan miraculously recovered, Desai felt that art had to imitate life and though originally the plot called for Bachchan to die at the end, the script was changed to make him survive even after being riddled with bullets.

Excitement Aplenty: Desai says: "To hoodwink a public into watching spellbound for three hours is no mean art and something these so-called art movies can never achieve." Coolie offers plenty of stock-in-trade "thrills and delights".

Among them: a village flood scene following the bursting of a dam, a Haj pilgrimage ship and prayers in Mecca, a romance scene in which the hero and heroine push Rs 16,000 worth of oranges down the Western Ghats, a razzle-dazzle political meeting with a cast of thousands, a trained falcon costing Rs 1.5 lakh in hire charges, plus an endless sequence of fight scenes, chase scenes and songs .and dances.

With all that at his disposal, Desai obviously felt no need for a plot and improvises with his favourite theme of characters gelting lost and found for which he says he drew his inspiration from the Mahabharat.

Since nothing succeeds like excess; the heroes, heroines, villains, mothers, fathers and children all at various points get misplaced and rediscover each other over a decade later - with so many of them peppered through the plot, even the script- writer gets casual about the reunions and the scenario at times resembles a lost property office.

Desai describes his films as hero-oriented and action packed. Of the two heroes, Iqbal (Bachchan) and Sunny (Rishi Kapoor), Bachchan is his favourite - his lucky star whom he has cast in every film since Amur Akbar Anthony. Bachchan, after his recovery, continued the interrupted film shooting by gamely enacting many more punching bouts.

The action includes him jumping in slow motion from a roof, and at one stage, like Tarzan with Jane, he props Julie (Rati Agnihotri) on his shoulder and carries her off.

Wide Variety: Desai admits that his heroines Julie and Deepa (Shoma Anand) are meant to be just props but their fresh-faced looks do show up Bachchan's age a bit. Still, whether he is spouting bombastic speeches on the upliftment of the coolies or performing such slapstick comedy as sitting on an egg and hatching a chicken, he tries to look unembarrassed and puts his soul into it. Salma (Waheeda Rehman), his long-separated mother, tries equally hard to take her part seriously.

The script stresses egalitarianism by making the illiterate coolie marry a spoiled rich girl. And to bridge the gulf in their prospects, the coolie has to join politics. As villain Zafer Khan (Kader Khan) notes: "When all other businesses fail, try the elections."

Given Desai's past directorial successes, the odds are heavily in favour of a jubilee run for this Rs 3 crore bit of nonsense. But it just could be that the icing is laid on too thick and while tastes may have changed, the super-entertainer's formula has not. The reaction of people leaving the film could well be: Haven't we seen this somewhere before?