New Delhi : So finally, Bollywood has its own ‘Die Hard’. The Los Angeles skyscraper is turned into a glitzy Mumbai hospital, Bruce Saviour-In-A-Singlet Willis is played by our own Vidyut Jammwal, the estranged wife from the Hollywood blockbuster becomes a recovering-from-an-operation spouse (Rukmini Maitra), and the hard-nosed terrorists are led by a gun-toting Chandan Roy Sanyal who gets to say those immortal words every actor can kill for: Time To Tango.
A big-ticket criminal (Karmakar) is in the hospital for a procedure, and his squad is zeroing in. Everything happens by the numbers: take-over of basement parking, check, control room with CCTVs, check, corralling the hostages, check. MMA coach Vivaan (Jammwal) is on the spot to take his wife back home. Said wife (Maitra) looks fetching throughout in a soft blow-out. In between, the leader of the gang (Roy Sanyal) strides along corridors going rat-a-tat, blowing big holes into sundry bodies, and when the plot demands it, chucking someone out of a high window. A hard-nosed cop (Dhupia) declares, ‘we are Mumbai police’, just in case we missed it. By rights, ‘Sanak’ should have been a non-stop ride. But it is more like a stroll in the park, devoid of any spark.
You wonder why it took so long to get to this rip-off, given that Hindi cinema had beaten everyone in making films in which our heroes turn into Rescuing Rambos. Remember the 1980 ‘The Burning Train’? So many decades have passed, there is so much cutting edge technology that movies can make use of, and there is Jammwal, so good at vaulting across rooms and pulping baddies. But it’s the same old problem of saggy writing which not even the most ripped muscleman can save.
Sample this line. Says Jammwal to a perky kid, right in the middle of a tense situation: ‘Are you ready to kill the bad guys?’ Says kid, ‘I was born ready, uncle’. Err, okay.
