This high budget remake of the hollywood action comedy Knight and Day (2010) brings, unlike the orginal version, more romance and opulent visuality. The film also offers one of the most magnificent action scenes in the history of the Indian movie industry. The motion picture was shot on various appealing locations including Prague.
2014 – 153 min – action, adventure, comedy
language: Hindi, Telugu, Tamil – subtitles: Czech, English
directed by: Siddharth Anand
cast: Hrithik Roshan, Katrina Kaif, Pavan Malhotra
India is one of the few countries where home production films are still more successful and attract a wider audience than the American ones. Still Hollywood studios are getting more and more interested in the Indian audience. They are highly aware of the fact that American movies are not going to impress Indians as much as Chinese or Japanese viewers. Nevertheless, they do not ignore the Indian movie market and are breaking into it instead by founding local subsidiaries. Fox Star Studios, the daughter company of one of the biggest hollywood studies, Century Fox, is one of them. Thanks to this proprietary connection, the Indian production can easily create remakes of films, whose rights belong to Fox. Two official remakes of foreign movies were made in 2014 under the aegis of the Indian Fox: the social drama CityLights inspired by the highly-appreciated British-Filipino film Metro Manila (2014), and the high budget action comedy Bang Bang!, which was based on the hollywood blockbuster Knight and Day (2014).
The Indian remakes of American motion pictures in Bollywood have become a tradition since the silent movies era and lots of them were produced in the 90’s. They radically differ from Bang Bang! not only by the illegality (they were shot without purchasing copyright laws) but as well by the formal way of adaptation. For that matter, the specificity of the bollywood storytelling and stylistic methods can be considered to be one of the main reasons why the American movies were fractionally less successful than the Indian remakes.
Nowadays we can observe that the difference between American and Indian approach is slowly becoming insignificant and the comparison of Bang Bang! with its model movie proves that it is true. The Indian version is more stylized from the visual and dramatic point of view, the emphasis is put on family values, it crosses out one of the supporting characters and there is no reference to the fate of the world at stake. Otherwise it follows the original line perfectly. We could even say that James Mangold’s original version already included many attributes that are rather expected from bollywood films – the connection between comedy with action and romance, frequent shifts in filming locations, besides other things.
The movie makers lead by Siddhart Malhotra focused especially on miscellaneous action scenes and worked on them together with specialists from the USA. The car chase scenes stand out and their magnificence cannot be compared to any other Indian movie.
Author: Miroslav Libicher
Trailer Bang Bang!
