Avoid this Jail.

Grade: C-

Jail

Indian Release Date: 06/11/09
CBFC Classification:  U/A
Running Length: 2 Hours 15 Minutes

Cast: Neil Nitin Mukesh, Manoj Bajpayee, Mughda Godse, Arya Babbar, Rahul Singh, Chetan Pandit
Director: Madhur Bhandarkar
Screenplay: Madhur Bhandarkar, Manoj Tyagi & Anuradha Tiwari
Cinematography: Kalpesh Bhandarkar
Music: Sharib Sabri, Toshi Sabri & Shamir Tandon

“These walls are funny. First you hate 'em, then you get used to 'em. Enough time passes, you get so you depend on them. That's institutionalized. They send you here for life, and that's exactly what they take. The part that counts, anyway.” – Red from ‘The Shawshank Redemption’

I know it wasn’t needed but couldn’t resist quoting from one of my favorite movies. ‘The Shawshank Redemption’ uses prison life as a metaphor to speak about various facets of life & even if people don’t get the metaphors it still has enough on the surface to stir something inside you. The only thing stirring inside me through most of Jail was restlessness & not because the movie’s depiction of prison life was making me queasy but simply because I was bored out of my wits & wanted to get the hell out of the theatre.

Parag Dixit (Neil Nitin Mukesh) is a guy as regular as they can get only in Hindi films. He‘s recently been promoted to the post of a regional manager of the company he works in, he has a pretty girlfriend (Mughda Godse), a nice big car but weirdly still prefers sharing his house (must be a really stingy fellow) with a roommate, Keshav. Unknown to Parag, Keshav is actually a drug dealer & is shot in an encounter with the cops while Parag is wrongly implicated as his associate dealer simply on the basis of a few phone calls from his mobile-phone & the drugs & gun found on Keshav. Routine court procedures coupled with a complete lack of competent police investigations; force Parag to spend time initially at the police station & later at a proper jail. There in jail he meets an assortment of characters Nawab (Manoj Bajpayee) the jailer’s personal assistant who’s a prisoner too, Ghani (Rahul Singh) who accidently killed his wife’s former lover, Kabir (Aarya Babbar) the in-house don’s favorite henchman, plus there are an assortment of other characters drawn from real & reel life. Thus begins Parag’s long ordeal to prove his innocence & also to maintain his sanity in a place that is far from comfortable in everyway he has ever known in his life.

The plot starts off decently but almost completely vanishes once Parag is sentenced to jail. From here on the movie only shows a clichéd jail routine (seen in countless other films) with an assortment of various banal characters interacting amongst themselves & with Parag. Large portions of the movie are repetitive & tend to drag on endlessly without any purpose. The court scenes are plenty & I could have sworn having déjà vu in all of them except for the first & the climatic scene. The lawyer is one hell of a stupid character & if only they has applied what was said in the final court scene by presenting the facts as they were before then the case would have been closed long back & the movie could have saved itself the bloated running time.   
   
Jail is like almost any other Madhur Bhandarkar movie since Chandni Bar (2001) if anything it’s marginally more genuine than any of his efforts since 2001. He’s taken it upon himself to be the “schlock-meister” of the masses & over so many movies right from the overrated Page 3 (2005) has perfected a set formula which he repeats with alarming regularity. His shambolic efforts at “exposing” the truth behind various facets of life in India have been nothing more than mob-mentality banter told through caricatures he believes exist in society at every nook and corner.

To lend some sort of “edge” & create a “hard-hitting” tag to the film he either adds some nudity (which is cheaply done & covered up soon after a “battle” with the censor board), plenty of sexual references (cardboard cutout homosexual characters thrive here) & by branding things normally considered taboo by middle-class mentality as vices of the more privileged class. He’s no different from those overblown news channels which are constantly “breaking news” about some or the other “expose” like your life depends on you having the knowledge of it.

The characters when not borrowed from the ‘prison movie clichés book’ are drawn from real life incidents. So there is a bookie, an entire family in for dowry harassment, a naxal sympathizer, a rich kid who ran over a few homeless people while driving drunk, I’m sure all of them ring a bell. All of them seem so bogus that it’s hard to accept them as real people who are part of the crowd.

Neil Nitin Mukesh still can’t act beyond a few recycled facial expressions & his dialogue delivery is stilted at best. He’s at his unintentionally funniest when he’s trying to show his distress during the court scenes, but he does better in the quieter scenes. Manoj Bajpayee does remarkably well with a poorly written character & along with Chetan Pandit who plays the head inspector at the jail are easily the two best performances of the film. Arya Babbar does the staple Bollywood tapori/bhai routine which by now shouldn’t be a stretch for any actor worth his salt. Rahul Singh on the other hand has a handful of emotional scenes where he shows some real promise as an actor. A majority of the other characters are played by regulars from other Bhandarkar movies.  

To call Jail a bad movie would be kind of unfair & especially considering some of the trash I’ve had to endure in the past few weeks it’s a step up, even if barely. It has some decent acting & a few scenes scattered way apart which are half-decently written. Plus the prison setting in the movie allows him to create a far more convincing environment than his previous efforts.

Bhandarkar sets out to show us things we have already seen & heard in countless other places. We already know of the river of decadence which runs through places like this & how the root of the rot lies in our apathetic judicial system & engrossing tales set within the same environs have worked before in various mediums. So where does Jail fail then? Well, while being busy trying to “shock” people & gain as much sympathy due these huge emotional facades he creates (replete with sad old filmy background scores), Bhandarkar forgets he’s directing a movie & not editing an episode of ‘Big Boss – The Prison Edition’.

Final Verdict: Maybe visiting an actual jail might be more worthwhile than watching this movie.

Grade: C-
 

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