Akshay Kumar is kick ass in 'Gabbar is Back'

If you can’t fix ’em, finish ’em. Akshay Kumar hawks that debatable philosophy in this week’s Gabbar Is Back, playing the infallible social vigilante. The mixed masala pack, otherwise forgettable beyond its first weekend hype, demands longer look for two basic reasons.

First, Gabbar Is Back advocates violence is a cool tool for social reform. Second, as Akshay growls on the prowl, hunting for villains to gun/maim/hang, the film tries a fancy update on how the prototype mainstream action hero may be perceived from now on.

Coming after Ungli and Mr X this year, Gabbar Is Back is trying to add the term "vigilante" to the Bollywood dictionary. They seem to have discovered the word lately — blame it on all those fabulous superhero flicks coming out of Hollywood — although Amitabh Bachchan’s angry young man did pretty much the same bash-up job on social scum all those decades ago.

Hawking Akshay’s Gabbar a social vigilante and not an action hero is obviously driven by smart marketing logic. Change in era calls for change in definition. That is an eternal axiom in showbiz, a world where nothing actually changes.

However if the action hero has been the most popular avatar of our leading men in modern times (barring intermittent romantic phases of Rajesh Khanna and Shah Rukh Khan), the novelty has to extend beyond revision of nomenclature.

The packaging has to be different beyond discovering new camera angles to capture the hero kicking villain butt.

So, Akshay as Gabbar is given a personality makeover. As the action hero morphs into vigilante, he is driven by cold fanaticism more than emotional passion to set wrongs right. His operation is more of an organised venture. He sets up a task force to help him bust evil unlike action heroes of the past who mostly operated single-handedly.

Law of the land never really mattered to the Bollywood hero, who deemed it was his birthright to kill the bad man — courts and judges be damned. In the case of Gabbar — as also the protagonist Ungli Gang in Ungli or Emraan Hashmi’s vanishing blunder Mr X — you spot a certain relish as the heroes take a tainted life.

Akshay and his producer Sanjay Leela Bhansali were obviously aware why the idea might work when they set about translating (almost word for word) a 13-year-old Tamil flick titled Ramanaa into Gabbar Is Back.

Over the past four decades at least, genres in Bollywood have worked in sync with mindset of the nation. Peaceful times have seen romantic films flourish. Action as a genre has mostly reaped it rich exploiting a deep sense of anger and popular uncertainty. Sample the '70s when optimistic nationalism had started waning for the first time since independence. In turn, Bollywood saw the rise of the angry young man whose popularity would peak around the Emergency.

Being classified vigilante — as opposed to regular action hero — sounds like a neat box office trick given the country’s current situation. Crime is up, women are obviously not feeling safe, corruption continues, scams are still fresh in the mind. A crusader to set it all right fits the big fantasy screen well.