Not worth a Gekko!

Shikhar

Director: John Mathew Matthan

Actors: Ajay Devgan, Shahid Kapoor

By Mayank Shekhar

Almost a decade and half ago, a close buddy of mine, very young then, had a huge plaque in his room that almost took care of a good portion of a wall. The opulently laminated cardboard that we’d later take his trip about had just three words imprinted in a huge point size. It said “Greed is good” – a reasonably simplistic quote from Wall Street (1987) that my childhood friend had chosen to adopt as his deep talisman!

That’s how strong the screen presence of Michael Douglas’s Gordon Gekko was in Oliver Stone’s 1987 film. While Douglas’s guiltlessly law-breaking stockbroker was an obvious anti-hero, you could see his side of the debate between morality and the riches. Or an impressionable mind at a tender age did, and perceived the protagonist’s point of view as being worthy of philosophy. Which roughly implied that pleasure and paisa are purely the purpose of our existence.

A naïve kid like Charlie Sheen’s Bud Fox, willing to go against his paternal morals, immensely swayed by the hedonistic life of an older, successful man of the supposed “real world” is pretty much the premise of this film too.

Devgan’s convincingly portrayed GG, curiously with the same initials as Douglas’s go-getter, is an over-ambitious land shark with essentially a plan to build a huge township that he annoyingly prefers to call a ‘city’ (along the lines of Las Vegas). The only hitch in his grand development project centred on a huge, green, watered rural tract is an ashram run by an industrialist-turned-ascetic (Javed Sheikh).

The best plausible solution to GG’s problems is to get the philanthropist’s son (Kapoor, good casting decision) under his wing, hook him on to high-life, make him go against his father’s values, and get the project kick-started again. Through the shenanigans, especially when spotting latent attempts at making a broad argument (competent dialogue-writing here, Hriday Lani), you can tell that the filmmaker is thinking big. Which is a good sign, given that he is at least thinking!

Not a good sign that when it’s all rightly set up, you get where the characters are coming from, you get disappointed because the picture thereafter seems to be going nowhere. Or perhaps only going towards the son’s penance, where Devgan’s neatly camouflaged wheeler-dealer ‘hero’ becomes the reductive villain you can never identify with. Or perhaps the film is actually going towards resolving the land issue itself, as against the well laid out plot: endlessly dragging the affair in the final hour, carelessly losing sight of the initial larger point.

It’s all about characters (Bipasha Basu, Sushant Singh…) then, introduced in manners that you’d like to know them better, while we never move beyond the handshake. So it’s really all about the first-half’s run-up in that case. Unfortunately, you have to pay the full ticket-money for it. What a waste (of your bucks, and their big idea).