Fans of Vikramaditya Motwane’s Bhavesh Joshi Superhero lapped up a recent reel comparing it to Matt Reeves’ The Batman. Granted, it was mostly restricted to superficial similarities between the two superhero movies (and some very basic thematic connections), but the evidence was so compelling that one couldn’t help but take it seriously. Nobody, however, has made such a reel about Rajkumar Santoshi’s cop epic Khakee, which has such specific overlaps with the James Bond film Skyfall that you could almost picture director Sam Mendes having caught it on opening night in Mumbai.
If Pritam can lift the music of an obscure Indonesian band and avoid drawing suspicion, then why can’t the Oscar-winning Mendes pull the same move on an Indian film? Of course, it’s entirely possible that this is all just a giant coincidence, but that wouldn’t be any fun to discuss, would it? Skyfall was released nearly a decade after Khakee, emerging as the highest-grossing Bond film of all time. Unlike earlier instalments of the storied franchise, the film presented a more intimate portrait of Bond, revealing information about his past that we didn’t know before.
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The climax, for instance, was staged at Bond’s childhood home, where he faced off against the villainous Silva — a disgruntled former MI6 agent with a bone to pick against his old boss, M. Designed like a Western siege, the scene takes place mainly inside Bond’s mansion, before spilling out onto the property’s sprawling grounds. A near-identical sequence, would you believe, unfolds just before the interval in Khakee, the star-studded 2004 film that combined the grittiness of Ram Gopal Varma’s Satya with old-fashioned Bollywood masala.
In Khakee, a veteran cop named Anant Srivastava (Amitabh Bachchan) is tasked with putting together a crack team to escort a suspected terrorist from a small town to neighbouring Mumbai, where he will stand trial for his alleged crimes. This is a quintessentially Western set-up, seen in such films as 3:10 to Yuma, and more recently, in Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight. Despite finding the time for a CGI-fuelled dance number — “Dil Dooba” — Anant and his team recognise the danger they’re in, and proceed determinedly on their perilous journey to Mumbai. They’re tailed by a mysterious villain who keeps taunting them with polite greetings, and sounds an awful lot like he’s about to endorse mouth freshener.
Actor Ajay Devgn in Khakee. (Express Archive)
This man is Aangre, played by Ajay Devgn in a rare villainous turn. He wears a plain jacket over an even plainer vest, but his most striking feature — besides a hairdo that makes it seem as if he’s just been to the salon — is a pair of sunglasses that the Gen Z has recently made fashionable again. Along the way, Anant and his team are ambushed by Aangre, and having sustained considerable damage, forced to retreat to a secluded mansion.
The staging, structure, and even the stakes of this centre-piece sequence are uncannily similar to Skyfall’s climax. For starters, when Anant and his team arrive at the mansion, they’re greeted by an old caretaker. In Skyfall, Bond and M are also welcomed to the property by its old gamekeeper, played by Albert Finney. As they batten down the hatches, preparing for Aangre’s inevitable assault, the mood is tense. The protagonists are cornered, as gunfire pulverizes the windows. It is in this scene that Aangre removes his shades to reveal a grotesquely disfigured face, like all the most memorable Bond villains, including Silva.
But what’s most striking about all of this is Aangre’s backstory. Anant, who has lived on the principles of ‘zameer’ and ‘vivek’, discovers that Aangre was an old colleague of his in the police, and was dishonourably discharged for often taking the ‘extra-judicial’ route to dispensing justice. Haranguing Anant days before his retirement is his way of getting back at him. In Skyfall, Javier Bardem’s disgraced former agent Silva also has a personal score to settle M, who threw him under the bus for taking the law into his own hand.
Amitabh Bachchan and Tusshar Kapoor in film Khakee. (Express Archive)
Interestingly, the one key area in which Khakee differs from Skyfall is its general progressiveness. While the Bond movie, despite its many achievements, had an almost romantic view of the UK’s colonial past, Khakee was positively progressive, not only for 20 years ago, but even by today’s standards. But that isn’t saying much, considering the stronghold that Rohit Shetty’s ‘copaganda’ films occupy in culture. It’s no coincidence that Khakee was co-written by Sridhar Raghavan, one of the key creative forces behind last year’s sneakily subversive Pathaan, and the more recent (and even more radical) Tiger 3.
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One of the primary themes of Khakee is Islamophobia — Anant and the gang unites in not only defending, but also preserving the honour of a Muslim man falsely accused of terrible crimes. It preempted Kafeel Khan’s story in its characterisation of the doctor Ansari, played by Atul Kulkarni, years before Jawan. And that’s the lasting impression that the movie leaves you with. The Skyfall conspiracy theories are momentarily amusing, but the image of Amitabh Bachchan lecturing a violent mob about the Constitution will remain for eternity. As they say, only in the movies…
Post Credits Scene is a column in which we dissect new releases every week, with particular focus on context, craft, and characters. Because there’s always something to fixate about once the dust has settled.
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