![]() Abraham, on the other hand, sweats and strains and growls each utterance through a hoarse throat, as if afraid of not being heard by the audience member in the last row. He knows that the line is already laced with gunpowder – there’s no need for him to blow up as well. When a cop asks him to clean up the city, he smiles and says, “ Jis safai ki baat aap kar rahe ho, usey sadkon mein sabun ka pani nahin, khoon bahega.” This is pulp prose at its most purple, and Bajpai delivers it in a matter-of-fact manner. The film is about Mumbai police’s first registered encounter, which resulted in Surve’s death, and Bajpai plays a rival gangster, Zubair Haskar, who sometimes works with the police. It doesn’t help that Manoj Bajpai is at hand to show exactly how this rhetoric should be delivered. Imagine The Incredible Hulk quoting Yeats and you’ll know what I mean. ![]() It’s impossible not to have these thoughts because Abraham’s body is stretched across the screen at every opportunity, and because if you didn’t look at that body, you’d be forced to concentrate on his rhetoric. How do they maintain it if they’re on the run from the police? Do they simply hide out at the nearest Talwalkar’s, doing bench presses as a henchman holds a gun to a trainer’s temple? And from where do they derive protein? Surely not from the booze and the greasy legs of chicken at the upscale restaurants they always seem to duck into, the kind where a Priyanka Chopra or a Sunny Leone is always around to perform an item number? It’s impossible not to have these thoughts seeing John Abraham play Manya Surve in Sanjay Gupta’s Shootout at Wadala, which is set in the late 1970s and the early 1980s, a time when a gym meant a skipping rope and a set of barbells. There’s something odd about gangsters with a six pack. ![]()
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