Insaniyat

Decided to rewatch this while on lockdown. I was surprised with the video quality, I saw a vhs back in the day probably re-recorded on a hundred times. Glad we had auto tracking.

This thing barely makes sense. One of Amitabh's "worst" efforts. Star power keeps you going, so many names, and it's just bad enough to be in the so bad it's good category. You can tell some scenes were filmed years apart. I wonder if anyone watched a final copy before releasing it. Whatever happened behind the scenes must've been quite an effort. It's not easy to put something like this together.

This movie was conceived way back in the 1980s, sometime after Mr. Natwarlal became a mega hit. To say that the production started in 1991 and movie released in 1994 is the biggest myth. Production started some 17 years, yes repeat, 17 years before it actually released. Tito and Tony wanted to give their best blockbuster ever. Somehow, the movie kept going into the cans as years went by. Each time, it was removed from the can and some portions shot. If you watch the movie carefully, you will find Amitabh as young and handsome as he was in Mr. Natwarlal in this movie in a short scene. You will see him balding (when he came back from politics), you will see him with short hair, long hair, really fat, fat, trim, a bit extra, old, young, middle aged and so on. Somehow, the producer managed to put it together and got it off the finishing line. Let us give due credit for all this effort. Agreed, that the end product was substandard & flop despite such a long cast, long list of singers and so on. It will be certainly a memorable film in its own way.

What was to become Amitabh Bachchan's final movie of his career before retirement, he ended with an action movie. I thought it was one of the best movies of him where he played an honest police officer who had two tasks - one to end the rivalry of Chunkey Pandey and Sunny Deol and two to destroy the villain Anupam Kher. There were some great songs in this movie sung by all the stars. There was also a young Raveena Tandon, who was only a newcomer. Sonam looking stunning with Chunkey Pandey. Amitabh singing in prison with Jaya Pradha, "Saathi Tera Pyar", another wonderful song. The best one out of all must be "Mere Dil Mein Tu" sung by Chunkey, Sunny and Amitabh. After almost 20 years Nutan was back with Amitabh and she played his wife in Saudagar in 1973. Only this time she was playing mother to him, while 70s and 80s low-key actor Vinod Mehra played his younger brother. After this movie, Nutan and Vinod Mehra died. Perhaps the movie delayed until 1994. Although the movie was a box-office flop, I thought Amitabh performed great. Amitabh came back with the box-office disaster Mrityudaata in 1997.

I am definitely one of the world's biggest Amitabh Bachchan fans ... which is probably why I hate this movie and haven't even been able to finish watching it. Bachchan's early work is brilliant, in my opinion, and there have also been some stunning performances in his recent movies ... but 'Insaniyat' falls in a huge crack in the middle. The Big B looks awkward, tired, out of date and (unbelievably for Bachchan) severely and desperately uncool in this movie. He does try hard, but he doesn't pull it off (not by a long shot), and the worst part is that you can tell he knows he isn't succeeding. I'm so glad he didn't retire from the big screen after this movie, and that he's still putting out fabulous work. Sunny Deol does his pouting best in this movie (although he can never, in my opinion, match up to his legendary dad - sorry, Sunny), but it's not a remarkable performance. This movie does try hard, with a star-studded cast, a big budget and fair performances by most cast members, but it just doesn't fulfil its promise.