Director: N. Chandra; Writer: N. Chandra; Producer: N. Chandra; Cinematographer: Binod Pradhan; Editor: N. Chandra; Cast: Sunny Deol, Dimple Kapadia, Om Puri, Urmila, Ravi Behl, Babban Yadav, Satish Shah, Guddi Maruti, Sharat Saxena, Usha Nadkarni, Shafi Inamdar, Om Shivpuri, Nivedita Joshi Saraf, Brij Gopal, Shail Chaturvedi
Summary: Baapji (Om Puri) is the self-styled king of a
township. His loyal lieutenant Narasimha
(Sunny Deol) commits the crimes for him.
Baapji kills the only honest policeman who
attempts to arrest him, and the cop’s son, who
is in love with Baapji’s daughter, is severely
beaten. Baapji’s daughter drives off a
mountainside and declares that she will do
worse if her father does her boyfriend any
more harm. When Baapji asks Narasimha to
expel the policeman’s family from the town,
Narasimha recalls his own homeless past,
reforms and turns against his mentor. The film
updates Vishnu Purana’s legend: Narasimha,
half man and half lion, bursts out of a pillar to
destroy the evil Hiranyakashapu. Sunny Deol,
acting in the Rambo-style, performs the
mythological act shortly after he has been
chained and whipped, and then goes on almost
single-handedly to destroy Baapji’s mansion,
allowing the young lovers to be united. The
villain is killed through divine intervention as
he is impaled by the falling hand of a giant
clock. Chandra’s visceral camerawork matches
the performance of the muscular Deol and
together they amount to a savage argument in
defence of a revivalist mass culture.
Indiancine.ma requires JavaScript.
