In Cautious Praise of Filmic Fiascoes

When it comes to bad films, there has to be a distinction between a ‘failure’ and a ‘fiasco’. Thomas Crowley trains his lens on the Salman Khan starrer ‘Kick’ and Luc Bresson’s ‘Lucy’ and shows us why they fall in the second category …

It’s no surprise that Salman Khan’s latest Eid release, Kick, was a mega-super-ultra-blockbuster. What’s shocking is that a film this bizarre and unnerving has gotten mostly positive reviews, which invariably, and blandly, praise it as an enjoyable masala adventure. A number of the reviews focus on the film’s box-office potential as much as its merits or demerits as a film; for instance, Bollywood Hungama said in its review, “It is sure to rewrite box-office records …  Kick is a sure blockbuster.” Many reviewers seem excessively deferential to the power of the box office. The thinking seems to be: if a film can bring in this much money, it must be OK!

There are exceptions to this, of course, especially away from the mainstream newspapers and Bollywood cheerleaders. Firstpost published not one but two scathing reviews of Kick. The tone of the reviews is one of outrage and bitterness, suggesting a personal vendetta against Khan rather than a fair-minded review of the film. Every line is an insult, with only a few sentences rising to the desired level of pithiness. (Best line by far: “If Robin Hood and Mother Teresa had a lovechild and that child was raised by Mithun Chakraborty, his name would be Devi Lal Singh,” Khan’s character.) The titles of the Firstpost reviews say it all: “No paisa vasool in Salman Khan’s spectacularly dull film”; “Salman’s latest will melt your brain and leave you angry.”



But the film did not leave me angry; it left me confused – and not just because my Hindi is a bit shaky. I was overwhelmed, I suppose, by the sheer magnitude of the audio-visual assault of the film: the recklessness with which it discards various plotlines it has spent so much time building up (whatever happened with the love triangle?) ; the knowing winks to other Salman Khan films; the deliberately bad dancing (make your weakness a strength, I suppose); the increasingly nonsensical plot twists; Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s gloriously go-for-broke hamminess; and above all, the audaciousness and confidence with which Khan waltzes through this disaster of a storyline. The entire premise of the film is preposterous – Khan is an adrenaline junkie whose only happiness in life comes from reckless thrill-seeking, and yet he is also an accomplished scientist and inventor, universally beloved by his friends.

Still, while the film may have been a train wreck, it was a fascinating train wreck. To use the ratings system popularised by the American film critic Nathan Rabin in his “My Year of Flops” column, Kick was a “fiasco,” not a “failure.” This is an important distinction when it comes to bad films. Rabin was inspired by an Orlando Bloom monologue in the film Elizabethtown: “There’s a difference between a failure and a fiasco. A failure is simply the non-presence of success. Any fool can accomplish failure. But… a fiasco is a disaster of mythic proportions. A fiasco is a folk tale told to others that makes other people feel more alive because. It. Didn’t. Happen. To. Them.”

Kick could well be described as “a disaster of epic proportions.” So too could the Luc Bresson film that recently had a limited release in India: Lucy. The film tells the story of an American expat, played by Scarlett Johansson, who is forced to become a drug mule and carry a new designer drug inside an incision in her abdomen. When the drug starts leaking into her circulatory system, it gives her increasingly godlike powers. The entire movie is based on the thoroughly-refuted myth that humans use only 10% of their brain. The conceit is that Lucy’s brainpower builds until, at the very end of the film, she reaches 100%. Bresson is known for making mindless action films, so he’s stepping into new territory with this premise, and, several times, he cheekily references the cinematic classic 2001: A Space Odyssey. In part, this seems like self-deprecation; but it also signals that Bresson has real ambitions for the film.

Lucy is filled with heavy-handed pseudo-science, and at many points strains credulity. Why would Lucy use her increasing enlightenment mainly for car chases and gun fights and violent revenge? Why would she lose her compassion as she gets more intelligent? Why does Morgan Freeman always have to play the wise elder type, even when he’s spouting absolute nonsense?

But like Kick, the film is buoyed along by its ridiculous energy and its commitment to following the absurdity through to the end. One reviewer described Besson films thus: “Mishmashes of near-nihilistic violence and shamelessly sappy sentimentality are Besson’s stock-in-trade.” In Lucy, “the combination feels more palatable than usual, in part, because the violence always registers as unreal.” Something similar could be said of Salman Khan films. The violence in his films is not nearly as wanton or explicit, but there is a vein of aggression running through them, often with a tone of cheerful criminality (even when he plays a cop). But it is a cartoonish violence, hard to take seriously. And in Kick, Khan goes even further to redeem himself; his criminality and violence are, in the end, for a cause that is beyond reproach. For the definition of “shameless sappy sentimentality,” see the denouement of Kick. In the end, Kick and Lucy may be bizarre, problematic films (their treatment of women, for example, is deeply troubling, even if Lucy boasts a strong female lead), but at least they have the courage of their convictions. Compare that to November Man, a recent Hollywood spy thriller starring Pierce Brosnan, in still-wishing-he-were-James-Bond mode. The film recycles spy movie clichés with a listlessness that is almost parodic. But it takes itself too seriously, and follows conventions too diligently, to elevate itself into the realm of fiasco. It is a failure, a film that any fool could accomplish. By the time the hero has finished unraveling international conspiracies, catching war criminals, and bedding the mysterious woman with a foreign accent, the audience has long stopped caring about the film. Give me the full-throttle fiascoes of Kick or Lucy; give me something to think about, even if that something is troubling and absurd in equal measures; but please spare me the going-through-the-motions tedium of November Man and its ilk.