Review: Shootout at Lokhandwala

Shootout at Lokhandwala (thriller)
Cast: Amitabh Bachchan, Sanjay Dutt, Viveik Oberoi, Suniel Shetty, Tusshar Kapoor
Direction: Apoorva Lakhia

One thing's for sure: Viveik is best when he is wicked. Give him the chocolate-hero roles and he flounders and fumbles. He just can't seem to get the popcorn romance crispy and crunchy. But give him Company, Omkara and now Lokhandwala and his eyes begin to flash with meanness, his body language becomes brattish, his lips twist into a natural snarl and the screen lights up with the antics of an anti-hero who makes bad good.
With his enunciation of the role of Maya Dolas, the real-life gangster who dared to raise his head against the D-Company, he effortlessly buries the baggage of a dead past: all the forgettable flops that seemed to be to taking his career nowhere.
Yes, Shootout at Lokhandwala is primarily Viveik Oberoi's coming-of-age film. And the fact that all the other actors create unforgettable characters only makes his job simpler. The wild and wicked nuances of Viveik's character are highlighted only because they are juxtaposed against the more restrained and sleek meanness of Sanjay Dutt, the encounter-friendly cop who believes the only way to clean up his office clutter is to kill the criminal and close the file.
It is the fragile balance between the cops and robbers' gangs that lends this film its chutzpah. So that, eventually, you really do not know where your sympathies truly lie. Sometimes, you want the vardiwallahs to score in the incessant shootouts and sometimes you wish the dashing devils get their due and walk away with the taalis and seetis .
Mostly, it is evil which has an upper hand and the allure of the Gang of Five, headed by Viveik, seems to overpower the muscle of the law, represented by Sanjay Dutt's three-man army. It is here the moral ambiguity — that director Apoorva Lakhia succeeds in giving Bollywood its first real desi Tarantino where the reservoir dogs truly have their day.
The city of Mumbai, once again, plays a pulsating, live entity in the film as the gangsters and the cops wage their relentless war for supremacy. The film is a potboiler, with the director never really letting go his grip on the medium; except in the song-dance sequences where the wild bunch live out their fantasies with the bar girl (Aarti Chabria).
Only one song actually adds to the flavour of the film: the Ganpat rap number, exquisitely sung (Mika) and choreographed, reminiscent of Satya's Goli maaro bheje mein . The pace is relentless, the performances are memorable (Tusshar too finds his groove), the tenor is dramatic, yet realistic and the violence hits hard and proper. Go, get your thrills.

SOURCE : THE TIMES OF INDIA