Khakee Region 4 DVD Review

Distributor: AV Channel
Certificate: PG | 86 minutes
Available to buy
Director: Rajkumar Santoshi
Reviewer: Alan R
Extras: Yes

ANYONE IN IT WE KNOW?
Amitabh Bachchan, Akshay Kumar, Ajay Devgan, Aishwarya Rai

WHAT’S IT ABOUT THEN?
DCP Shrivastav (Amitabh Bachchan), a senior policeman nearing the end of his career, is given the task of transporting a terrorist across the country to his trial. He selects a team of four men and they begin the long road-trip only to have their journey persistently dogged by a man called called Angre (Ajay Devgan) who is trying to kill their prisoner Dr Ansari (Atul Kulkarni) and the police team escorting him.

It transpires that the doctor is not a terrorist at all but came into possession of important papers implicating a high-ranking politician. And that politician wants Ansari eliminated before he can stand trial and he has Shrivastav’s police boss in his pocket to help him do this. But they reckoned without the resilience and resourcefulness of Shrivastav and his men who overcome all of Angre’s attempts to kill them. Shrivastav’s team includes Shekhar Verma (Akshay Kumar) who plays the romantic lead to a beautiful girl (Aishwarya Rai) whom Shrivastav lets accompany them.

SO IS IT ANY GOOD?
It has a good set of characters, a suitably menacing villain, a few good set pieces and a couple of unexpected twists. It’s a Bollywood film and as such the first I’ve seen. I had thought it was a sly joke that all Bollywood films included musical numbers but may be it’s not. Because amid all the police chase action and intrigue they find time for three totally contrived reasons to have musical singing and dancing sequences.

There’s also some quick twinkly music as the romantic lead looks down and then up quickly while talking to the girl (is this another Bollywood thing or a signature piece for that actor?). What I found strange also is that all the characters spoke the occasional line of their dialogue in English for no apparent reason. But those are not reasons to dislike it I’m just commenting on a few strangeness’ on my first encounter with this “genre” which, other than these “oddities”, is a regular sort of thriller-type film.

It’s a long film at almost 3 hours but it actually didn’t seem to drag and I ended up quite surprised at how quickly it had gone.