Brothers

Coming as a remake of the 2011 film Warrior, Brothers directed by Karan Malhotra have managed to grab the attention of the audience with its desi making style that works. The restructured elaborate screenplay may have made it a bit too melodramatic, but still it has that level of sensibility which takes it to a thoroughly enjoyable level. With the least expected Sidharth Malhotra creating a great impact on screen, Brothers has surprises and a few faults.

Monty and David are sons of ex fighter Gary Fernandez. The jail term of their father and the reason for that have seriously influenced the relationship between the brothers and the father feels guilty for that. The movie focuses on the newly formed mixed martial art championship Right to Fight (R2F) where these brothers decided to compete along with famous international fighters. Their journey in the tournament and the reasons why they wanted to be there etc. are the agenda of brothers.

Karan Malhotra who earlier made an impressive remake of Agneepath this time tries his luck with the Hollywood flick. May be because of the nature of the movies we are used to, the adapted screenplay by Ekta Pathak Malhotra becomes elaborative. The whole childhood story of the Fernandez brothers was something which wasn’t visually illustrated in the original. Here we get to see that in a modified version suiting the Indian clichés which ultimately results in the conflict between the brothers. Malhotra creates the pain and anger in his typical style filled with dramatic loud and exhilarating background scores with mix of slow motion shots. The fights that happen mostly in the second half were captured wonderfully and the whole process of cinematography, editing and action choreography gave a really appealing output of mixed martial arts on screen. The brutality these fights had was something that made the movie quite exciting considering the fact there wasn’t any big bang twists or turns in this emotional blood vs blood story.

Akshay Kumar who is well known for his amazing flexibility in doing this sort of martial arts stuff, finally gets a role that also demands acting. The actor was superb with his portrayal. The real surprise in my opinion was Sidharth Malhotra. I found him very boring in Ek Villain where also he kind of did some fights. But the actor has done a really impressive job here in destructing his chocolate look. He may still not be as tough as Tom Hardy, but Karan and Ekta smartly rewrites the character to make it easy for Sidharth. Jackie Shroff was good as the father. Jacqueline and Shefali Shah also performed nicely.

The making as I said has this desi flavour. The introductions and build-ups are quite interesting and with the exciting background score of Ajay-Atul combo a racy feel was created. The rewritten screenplay makes the drama cheesier like the sentimental flashing of childhood memories in between the climax fight. The cinematography was really good especially in capturing those fights. Akiv Ali’s cuts give a good tempo to the proceedings. Visual effects were okay and as I already said the fights were brutal and realistic. The music was also really nice.

Overall Brothers is a slightly melodramatic elaborated version of Warrior. With a few tweaks here and there and two actors who have given their full monty, Brothers will keep you occupied for its 157 minutes of runtime. The rating for this Karan Malhotra remake is 3.5/5.