Director: Kamal Haasan
Starring: Kamal Haasan, Pooja Kumar, Rahul Bose, Jaideep Ahlawat
Is kahani main sabka double role hai, says Andrea Jeremiah, who plays a kathak student cum agent in Vishwaroopam. But Kamal Haasan being the writer and director of Vishwaroopam gets to play three. So he's Viswanath, an effeminate Kathak teacher who loves to cook chicken for his wife (Pooja Kumar), a nuclear oncologist, who happens to be cheating on him. He's Wisam Ahmed Kashmiri, a trainer of Taliban in Afghanistan. And he is of course--no big surprise--a RAW agent who busts an Al Qaeda sleeper cell and saves New York from nuclear hell.
The only people who should be offended by the film ought to be those who don't want to see Kamal Haasan in every frame of the over two and a half hour long movie. And who have watched too many episodes of Homeland and much prefer to see Brody and Carrie play crazy agents on the loose. Other than that, it's hard to see what offends the organisations demanding a ban on the film. Is it because the film shows Taliban trying to attack New York? Err, not exactly a novel plot. Is it because it shows Kamal Haasan, who briefly plays a Muslim, yelling Krishna when he is attacked in, ah, the groin? Is it because Rahul Bose hams it up playing Omar, a Talibani who denies his wife western medical care and his children English education? Or perhaps it is because Pakistani generals are shown getting their orders from Osama bin Laden (again no surprise given he was living in their country as a virtual state guest).
Kamal Haasan has spared no expense in trying to blow up New York and various caves that pass off for Afghanistan. He even gives us a glimpse of Osama bin Laden, I presume just before Kathryn Bigelow picked him up for her own film on the war on terror, Zero Dark Thirty. Kamal Haasan has never been short on ambition. So the film travels from New York to what is ostensibly Afghanistan where Kamal Haasan's Wisam and Rahul Bose's Omar have fun shooting at pictures of George W Bush. And it goes back to New York again to save the fumbling FBI from embarrassing itself.
Several choppers get blown up, hands get severed, heads fly about, some with chests attached to them, and Americans are beheaded on camera. Kamal Haasan goes from long hair and chikan kurtas to short crop and black leather. We have no doubt about his range, we never did. We just wish we didn't have to see so much of him.
Am I bad man or a good man, he asks at one point in the movie. Is this a good movie or a bad movie? A bit of both--with both intentional and unintentional light relief. At one point, an FBI agent interviewing Pooja Kumar asks about her God. "My God has four hands," says Kumar. "Then how do you crucify him?" asks the agent. "We don't. We just dunk him in the sea." Ah, maybe a new controversy for the Hindus now.
Read more at: http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/viswaroopam-movie-review-by-kaveree-bamzai/1/248549.html
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