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'Tension deneka, lene ka nahin'

V Gangadhar

Krodh symbolises the progress of Hindi cinema. In earlier films like Boot Polish and Raksha Bandhan, the pyaare bhaiya hero had just one sister to take care of. But, in Krodh, the poor hero is saddled with five sisters!

How does he do it? By bashing up every male who dares to look at his sisters. This, of course, promptly gets him dubbed 'Hitler'. What Hitler was to the German Jews, the pyaare bhaiya is to the male population of the town.

Yet Krodh, so long as it kept to this track, was fairly entertaining. You felt the film's Hitler was justified in what he does... One of the suitors for his sister, for example, is the obnoxious Prem, played with disgusting crudeness by Johny Lever. Anyone would want to pound him!

From close to the intermission, though, Krodh goes haywire. One of the sisters gets raped by her professor and Hitler forces her to marry him. From which moment, she disappears completely from the film and should consider herself lucky. She escapes the fate of the rest of the cast.

For producer-director-editor Ashok Honda introduces, through a series of flashbacks, sequences and characters who simply mess up the story line. Enter gangsters Kabra, his brother who is made up like a weirdo and Balwant, a rival thug who is revealed as the hero's father. Kabra and brother are helped by a crooked lawyer who had framed Balwant for a murder he had not committed and sent him to jail. Their present target is our hero.

In the second half, the pyaare bhaiya has his hands full, what with keeping control over his sisters, bashing up villains and avenging the 'murder' of his father. You see krodh everywhere.

But the film goes to pieces because the flashbacks, rather jarringly, do not blend with the main narrative. The screenplay is full of gaping holes. We see the hero, as a young boy, slogging to take care of his sisters, sending them to school and so on. Suddenly the entire family shifts to a bungalow, their lifestyle undergoing a dramatic change. Did the poor brother win a lottery?

The editing is often jerky and, worse, the characters totally lack consistency. Take the case of the five sisters, who change their views about their pyaare bhaiya every second. One minute he is a demi-god, the second minute he is a bloodthirsty villain, the third he is back in favour, the fourth he is evil. And it goes on ad nauseam.

No wonder, our hero Karan (Sunil Shetty) wears a permanently perplexed look. He must have wondered why he starved, slogged and sacrificed so much to bring up this brood of sisters. I would not be surprised if Shetty stopped celebrating raksha bandhan in future.

Shetty dominates the film, but then he hardly has any competition. The brood of females who play the sisters scream, screech and sob in turn. The villains are meant to terrify us, but evoke laughter!

Anand-Milind's music is passable. Most of the songs, though badly positioned, are hummable. This is the only redeeming factor of Krodh.

'Taanshun dene ka hain, lene ka nahin,' is a sage piece of advice often muttered by the villain, Kabra. This gem of advice had been faithfully followed by everyone who associated with this film.

People who envy film critics should be sent to view Krodh, particularly at Dreamland theatre, which is sandwiched between Dreamland Mutton Shop and Dreamland Hairdressers. The traffic jams outside the theatre, the stampede to get into the auditorium, the bugs in the seats are enough to evoke the krodh of any Mahatma.