Heart of A Champion

I was watching the Hingis - Sugiyama match on TV today. Thats tennis for the idiots who navigated to this page by mistake. At one point, the score was 7-5, 3-0 to Sugiyama. After half an hour, Hingis had won the second set 6-3. Thats the heart of a champion. She managed to win 6 games on the trot against a very competitive player.

Scared? Hah! I was kidding. While this story is true and I enjoyed the match, I'm gonna make the day miserable for you by bitching about something!

AAN - Men at Work, was the title of this ambitious movie. It was well over two and a half hours long and had everyone including Santa Claus - oh no wait, that was LOC: Kargil. Now here is the intro scene for Akshay Kumar hereby simply referred to as AK because I'm too lazy to type out his full name each time and I want to test the depth of your memory. Anyone who says AK is for Anna Kournikova gets a punch to the jaw. So anyway, AK enters the den of some smugglers. The action starts.

He whips out a pair of pistols and shoots at everything hitting precisely nothing. He runs out of ammo. Ok, realistic so far. Now comes the weird part, the bad guy calls in re-inforcements. They appear in the form of a leather clad biker gang. At this point, there is a complete change in the scene. There is no transition whatever, and the scene is AK on his feet surrounded by the evil biker gang wearing helmets since Indian laws prohibit driving two-wheelers without the necessary cranial protection. But wait, what happened to the bikes?! The biker gang is _standing_ around AK. They probably decided the bikes were useless inside a 10 x 4 room anyway right? So now, the bikes are gone and ten biker dudes surround AK.

AK looks around, stomps the ground and his empty pistols fly up into his hands. I can't believe John Woo saw the future in his dreams and copied it in MI - II, but thats the exact same scene there. AK holds the guns by the barrel. The biker guys are suddenly holding machine guns. AK starts hitting all the biker guys in the head using the butts of the guns, while the biker gang is helplessly firing their machine gun innacurately into the air at the great distance of 2 feet from AK. He smashes a few helmets and suddenly the entire gang is down.

Bad guy escapes on a bike. AK finds a horse in an abandoned steel mill, and climbs on! He and the bad guy have a beast vs. machine showdown and the bad guy goes down into the dirt. AK graciously steps off the horse and confronts the bad guy mano - e - mano.

Its raining. Yes, its actually suddenly raining in this movie that tries so hard to be real you can believe it as soon as you believe that panda bears play Su-do-ku when they aren't busy chewing on leaves and destroying vegetation. So, its raining. A few slow-mo punches exchaged complete with droplets being rendered.

Next scene, the bad guy is standing stock still. AK jumps 10 feet in the air for a drop kick. Bad guy stares, bad guy is hit and bad guy takes a tumble. NEXT FRAME, bad guy is standing stock still. AK jumps 9.5 feet in the air for a roundhouse. Bad guy stares, bad guy is hit and bad guy takes a tumble. NEXT FRAME, bad is standing stock still..... you know what I mean.

Thats it, thats the beginning part of AAN. Its probably the worst action sequence made anywhere and equals all Rajnikanth fight scenes. It is one step above Mithun Chakroborty's after all, MC is a lanky Bengali with no penchant for action.

Why the director decided to copy John Woo and mix it with Matrix action to produce Maggi noodles, I'll never know. And I hope I never do. I have better ways to waste 3 hours of my life.

1. Rearrange my nasal hair.
2. Play with my nail filings.
3. Watch cricket.

Actually, scratch that last one, I wouldn't watch cricket if I was held at gunpoint. Maybe if I was surrounded by leather clad biker guys........