Content is king!

Bollywood has its limitations. The biggest of them is that largely it needs to show politically correct content, which does not hurt the sensitivity, read ego of anyone. Then you add the recent evil of promotions, huge production costs due to inflates superstar salaries, large screen number releases and you see that the aversion to doing something new and different becomes more necessary for the producers.

Yet the first two months of this year have already produced two movies, which seem to point yet again to a simple fact – good content or at least good presentation is necessary to win the audiences. Sometimes good presentation ends up making the same old as hills plot look new in terms of content too.

The first example is Sanjay Gupta’s ‘Kaabil’. This one was pitched against a movie which had a name none less than SRK himself in the lead. Add the hype and larger screen count of the other movie. Yet, slowly and gradually ‘Kaabil’ surged ahead.

‘Kaabil’ garnered word of mouth publicity and the support from the audience on social media. A huge troll army that came up in defence of the other movie today stands totally defeated. This is a victory which all of us who prefer a better content based Bollywood should celebrate.

It is not about an SRK movie going down, he is most likely to come back and probably destined to his share of celluloid success. It is about the audience serving a big lesson to those makers, who prefer screen counts and hype over content. Look at the content of ‘Kaabil’.

A wife gets raped. She commits suicide. The husband swears and executes ruthless revenge on her tormentors. What is so new about this plot? Nothing! Amitabh did the same 31 years ago in ‘Aakhri Raasta’. ‘Kaabil’ stood out purely for its presentation and twists and turns.

The hard hitting dialogues; so much so that by the end even the content seemed different and new. That is the power of good presentation. The bigger good news is audience had its common sense and judgement intact in choosing substance over hype.

The second great example is unfolding right now in theatres. ‘Jolly LLB 2’ is one of the better made sequels in Bollywood. It is probably second to only the ‘Munnabhai’ series. It is bluntly put far better than hyped sequels like ‘Dhoom 3’. ‘Jolly LLB 2’ in a lot of sense is content presented even better than ‘Kaabil’ and it also attempts a very different characterisation of an established action hero.

Imagine Akshay Kumar, the big daddy of gun shooting and kicks from the 1990s – is actually chased by a lone gun man in this movie in one sequence and he is actually running for his life. So many of us would expect Khiladi to simply swerve and land his kick on the jaw of the gunman knocking him cold.

In that sequence, however, a running for his life Akshay looked as convincing as the Khiladi we have known. That is how convincing the presentation is of ‘Jolly LLB 2’. The content is even better and I will be very surprised if this does not become one of Akshay’s career defining milestone movies.

The bigger point here is that the content of ‘Jolly LLB 2’ is again very well crafted. The basic premise of the content is yet again as old as the mountains. A man is falsely encountered and a battle for him is fought post his near family being totally wiped out.

The movie is set in the badlands of Uttar Pradesh where the judicial system is probably even worse in shape than our bigger cities. ‘Jolly LLB 2’ has a hero who is selfish, makes mistake and then redeems himself. The audience initially seems to love the movie for its fresh presentation.

The movie has been presented in a way where its protagonist comes across as one amongst us. If Bollywood can give us one such movie each month then 2017 will turn out to be the benchmark year for content-based movies from Bollywood.