Sawaal (1982)

Cast:
Earnest and boring police officer: Inspector Ravi Malhotra (Shashi Kapoor)

His innocent baby-faced girlfriend: Sonia Mehta (Poonam Dhillan)

Her effervescent brother: Vicky Mehta (Randhir Kapoor)

Vicky's fiancee: Reshmi (Swaroop Sampat)

Vicky and Sonia's mom: Anju Mehta (Waheeda Rehman)

Their evil smuggler dad: Dhanpathrai Mehta (Sanjeev Kumar)

His evil co-smuggler (and Reshmi's brother): Shamsher Singh (Prem Chopra)

A smuggler team man who wants to go straight: Madan Puri

I have never seen any actor as bored with his role as Shashi is in this movie, and it's no wonder, because his part must be unbearably dull to play. He is a "serious" police officer, who never smiles and runs around capturing bad guys and giving dialogues filled with righteous indignation.

He fights evil.

And he has a girlfriend.

And apparently a dad? (who shows up for about ten minutes as a plot device and then never appears again, in spite of being left in the hospital the last we see him?)

But essentially Shashi only plays the foil to Sanjeev Kumar's wonderful wickedness. Sanjeev even gets better theme music. And a really cool icon collection.

The other noteworthy things: Prem Chopra shows off his eyebrow skills. (And he dances a little bit. I think this is the first time I've seen the bad guy dance. Usually you can tell who's actually a good guy by whether they hop up and join the dancing. Don't let this fool you; Prem stays evil-evil-evil.)

As you might have noticed from the cast descriptions, there is a potential conflict between Ravi, the super-righteous and humorless police officer and Dhanpathrai, his super-evil prospective father-in-law. And yup, that is a problem. Eventually, Dhanpathrai realizes he has to choose between his career and his kids.

The ending seems pretty abrupt to me, like they realized nothing was going to save this and they might as well cut it short. Still, it's not that bad, and if you're a Sanjeev Kumar fan, this film might be worth watching for you -- his part is pretty cool. Or if you have an unusual love for Prem Chopra, he gets a lot of screen time. But if you're a Shashi fan, don't bother.

Action Replayy (2010)

I enjoyed the music in Action Replayy (although none of it seems very 70s inspired), I liked the newcomer Aditya Roy Kapoor, one or two of the lines, and um, that's about it.

It's not that I always insist on intelligent plots; it could have been a blast to return to the 1970s (a GREAT era of nonsense Bollywood fun), but if the plot is dumb, something needs to be engaging. And in this case, there's something mildly painful about, well, everything. If this picture doesn't look super awkward to you, this movie might be just your thing.

Before you make your decision, though, let me add a few more pictures of Akshay's wig.

I don't think this really does justice to it. By the way, all of the above pictures are from one song. I think the song is pretty, but in order to enjoy it Mom and I pretended that they were actually an older couple escaping from their five kids for a day out. Mom later changed the number to ten kids, which was better.

The plot starts out with Bunty (Aditya Roy Kapoor) refusing to marry his girlfriend because his parents' bad marriage makes him believe that marriage doesn't work. His girlfriend's grandpa (Randhir Kapoor) is an inventor of a time machine, and after a particularly bad night of fights, Bunty hyjacks the machine in the hope that he can get his parents, who never did love each other, to fall in love.

Here's Randhir Kapoor posing in front of his time machine:

And Bunty's parents (Akshay Kumar and Aishwarya Rai) looking much more age appropriate.

You can make people look older than they are, but it's not easy to make people look younger. Aish looks very beautiful in this movie

but she looks her age.

Well, the story moves along with about as little speed and as much awkwardness as possible. Until we end up with this:

Oh, for those of you who are still considering watching this, I think I should also add a picture of Akshay's fake overbite which he has for much of the movie.

Enjoy!