Shootout at Lokhandwala - Movie Review

Published: January 11, 2010

By JENNIFER HOPFINGER

Starring Amitabh Bachchan, Sanjay Dutt, Vivek Oberoi, Suniel Shetty, Arbaaz Khan, Tusshar Kapoor, Diya Mirza, Neha Dhupia

Freud would have a field day with this one. The film covers all the psychoanalytic favorites—the wanton id, the critical super-ego, Oedipal complexes, and penis envy—mixes in Victorian ideas about the public world (of men) and the private world (of women), and then plops all that oppressive Western thinking on top of old-fashioned Indian family values. But blink a few times and you may miss these themes in the frenetic orgy of violence.

The plot would be unbelievable if it weren’t based on a true story. Maya Dolas was a 25-year-old mob leader who was killed in 1991, along with five other gang members, by scores of police, led by the controversial officer Aftab Ahmed Khan, in a middle-class residential area of Mumbai, called Lokhandwala. The shootout lasted for hours and was broadcast on live television.

In the film, the story is told in flashback by Khan (played by Sanjay Dutt), who’s in trouble for what he did, to his lawyer Dhingra (Amitabh Bachchan), who sits in condescending judgment of him. Dhingra dispassionately questions Khan about his rationalization of the decision to execute Maya and his men without a trial and endanger the lives of countless citizens in the process. Khan explains that he sees nothing wrong with breaking the law in order to dispense justice.

In fact, he invites journalists to broadcast his exploits—namely, one pretty reporter named Meeta (Diya Mirza), which makes his wife Rohini (Neha Dhupia) jealous. But the gorgeous Rohini isn’t sexually threatened—rather, she’s envious of his career. Unlike Meeta, Rohini is stuck at home while her husband is out having an exciting time catching bad guys. But she skirts the issue and rebukes him for being a neglectful husband and father instead. The subtle implication throughout the film is that women emasculate men by domesticating them and yet have a moral responsibility to do so or else men will run amok, given their innate renegade tendencies, thereby putting women in the impossible situation of always being the bad guy (it’s hard to decide if this notion is more insulting to men or women). The woman in Maya’s life—his mother—also fails to rein him in. In fact, she encourages his life of crime, which started at the age of nine when he killed his father for beating her. Maya (Vivek Oberoi) is her knight in shining armor. And she’s the only one who can cow him into submission—she just doesn’t do so for the right reasons.

The maniacal Maya is a volcano of murderous rage, and Oberoi holds nothing back with his outrageous macho posturing and wicked glee. His gang’s reign of terror is erotically charged with hypermasculinity. Even in the musical numbers, it is the men who are on display. The climactic cataclysm happens in—of all places—a giant home of sorts—the Lokhandwala complex—where children play and women cook. Unrestrained male forces crash into the female domestic sphere and wreak bloody havoc.

Shootout at Lokhandwala is rated Skip.

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