Knock Out...whom?

There are two kinds of producers in Bollywood. One, the likes of KJo who remake Hollywood movies & insert hit Hollywood tunes into their movies, but do it with dignity by purchasing rights. Then there are the rest, who simply rip off the concept and/or story and hope to strike it rich back home.

Sanjay Dutt starring Knock Out falls into the latter category, I presume. Borrowed right off Colin Farrel's Phone Booth, Knock Out flatters to deceive not in parts, but almost in full. Phone Booth's concept is Indianized, but the execution falls awfully short of class, glamour & substance.

Irfan Khan plays Bachchu Khan. An investment banker by day, he is also the politician's middleman, by day. His "do number ka dhandha" is to pick & drop money from here to there & earn commission to lead a lavish life. One fine morning he steps into a telephone booth to get instructions on his daily delivery routine. He's about to step out when the phone rings, he picks & is trapped there for the rest of the movie.

It's Sanjay Dutt, an unknown stranger to Bachchu. Thus begins the cat & mouse game. Bachchu is hard pressed to recall why the stranger is black mailing him. He tries to wiggle out his way by offering "dus pethi" (aka Rs. 10 lakhs) to the stranger. Angry old Dutt screams his head off fuming that the sniper rifle he's pointed at Bachchu's head (of course from afar, through the Windows of an adjoining sky scraper) costs 15 pethi. The stranger also knows all about Bachchu's lavishness; that his Rolex was bought at Piccadilly Circus in London (an all cash deal); that his shiny shoe was bought at a Dubai mall; that in spite of being faithfully married (faithful part is for his wife) Bachchu is two-timing and in this manner whatever Bachchu knows about himself the stranger knows them too.

To wiggle out his way, the money factor now increases to fifty pethi, but the stranger still refuses. The stranger also knows that Bachchu now has some several pethi's in the briefcase that he's carrying & that he got this from the Child Welfare Department's (CWD) secretary. Bachchu's bulb lights up & he knows that he is talking to CWD's chief Col. Gill. Fraught with fear & new found respect for the army men, Bachchu tries to wiggle out by singing "Yeh desh hai veer jawaon ka", by praising the Colonel's achievements in Indo-PaK, Indo-China & Kargil wars which the colonel has never fought. None of it works and the laser from the 15 pethi sniper is still trained on his head inside the phone booth.

Col. Gill channels his anger on Bachchu on how he has aided CWD goons & politicians & how they were involved in child trafficking. Bachchu is also made to realize that some long time ago when he had a jolly good time with some lass, it destroyed her life & drove her to suicide. By this time, the media, the police and the public are all around the perimeter of the booth. Its confession time. The colonel asks Bachchu to talk to a reporter, played by Kangana Ranaut in a teeny-weeny one-and-half bit role. But before the confession we ought to have some entertainment & Bachchu dances to the tune of "zara zara touch me touch me". Irfan does this jig so entertainingly that its hard to not break out into a laughter. 

Humiliation complete & confession over, we now have a man with new found respect for all the womenfolk. But Col.Gill's, who is actually not Col. Gill, job ain't over it. We learn that Bachchu is the sidekick of a politician (played by Gulshan Grover) & he has the secret 19 digit code to the politico's Swiss Bank account which is guarding a whooping Rs.32000 crore. Dutt talks to this newly righteous man, trying to convince him to bring back all that money back to India. Between all this we have some more masala thrown in. A good cop handling the case is transferred & killed instantly. A corrupt trigger-happy cop takes over the case. Nancy Drew inspired Kangana tries to involve in hunt on finding who's holding Bachchu to ransom, squabbling politicians who now fear losing their money & an attempt to kill Bachchu in broad daylight in full view of the audience. Phew! so much action for so nothingness of a plot!!!

What could have been a pot boiler, turns into the oft repeated Nationalism & Patriotic jingoism. New leaf turned Bachchu transfers all the 32K crore money into Indian Treasury's bank account. We are also shown a progress bar of the money transfer being done. That was enough for me to smack my forehead, once again but for the last time. The end titles urge use to knock out such corrupt politicians & I chose to knock out this movie from my mind as well.

Somewhere in the plot, Bachchu asks Dutt, who is he working with. Dutt responds "Mein insaanon pe bharosa nahin karta, mere liye technology hi kaafi hai". Someone should have told Mani Shankar, the captain of this titanic, that "plot churaane se kaafi nahin hai, story ko develop bhi karna padta hai".