In one-half of this fling....sorry film...Akshay Kumar walks around like a zombie....but I've already forgotten which half. In another half, he gets brutally tortured by his senior colleagues in the police force.
But sorry...don't ask which half. Too busy licking our own wounds to care about our super-hero's scampering hinjinks, Police Farce....oops..."Police Force" leaves us gasping for air. The exit sign has never looked prettier....or more distant.
"Police Force" is as forceful as a punch in the stomach - and as entertaining as a visit to a zoo colonized by animals being drug-tested for a potentially dangerous new anti-rabies medication.
The plot -- from what one could make of it in the jumbled gyration of psychedelic song sequences and faded colour schemes that make the frames look as though they had been left out in the sun for too long - is all about very corrupt, very dangerous and very hammy politicians (played predictably by Mohan Joshi, Raj Babbar, Govind Namdeo, and co.) who would stop at nothing to bring gloom into the junta's life.
These khadi-clad goons, you suspect, have financed "Police Force" to emasculate and cut down the nation's morale after the tumultuous elections. As the narration builds up to a grating crescendo, the characters gather in the narrative's firing range like rusted guns pulled out of holsters that have seen better days.
A hit-man in fast-changing gaudy bush-shirts who discusses 'going' rates like vegetable prices, a mother (Ashalata) who pulls out all the drips from her son's veins in the hospital and screams, "He doesn't need medication, he'll live to kill the bad guys" and a pair of heaving bosoms in the second half....these are some of the grotesque members of the supporting cast.
The corny narration gets cornier with every heave of the editor's scissors. It includes a sequence where honest officer Amrish Puri orders seedy politician Govind Namdeo's clothes to be pulled off in lock-up. "The knickers as well," Puri snarls with a straight face.
Ever watched Namdeo cowering naked in a corner? Ever wondered why or how actors like him and Raj Babbar agree to do scenes that are unaesthetic and unbecoming?
In the midst of a blizzard of barren stunts and stunted characterizations, Akshay Kumar and Amrish Puri struggle to keep their heads above the mire. But it's a losing battle.
Oh yes, "Police Force" also stars Raveena Tandon who breezes in for the atrociously paced songs with Akshay Kumar, and then rushes out double-quick.
Wish we could follow suit and save ourselves the ordeal of watching a film that makes no sense to anyone including, one suspects, its makers.
Raveena deserves much better, and so do we.
Technically shoddy with Pramod Fatak' s cinematography groping hard to find a semblance of continuity in the uneven shots, "Police Force" is a tribute not to the resilience and endurance power of our brave cops, but to the avid movie watcher who can sit through the film in the hope that Akshay Kumar can deliver.
He delivers. But crusaders don't count in a chaotic jungle.
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