I had two conflicting thoughts about Bollywood legend Amitabh Bachchan’s role in the recent sci-fi blockbuster Kalki 2898 AD.  My first thought was that it was interesting to see an actor known for embodying the “Angry Young Man” archetype in 1970s Bollywood productions play a wizened, centuries-old warrior opposite a rebellious young man played by Tollywood star Prabhas, like a ceremonial passing of the torch.  My second thought was that I have no idea what I’m talking about.  I am aware enough of the Angry Young Man trope that Bachchan’s name rattles around in my head while watching his echoes in films as old as the 1982 Saturday Night Fever riff Disco Dancer and as recent as Dev Patel’s 2024 John Wick riff Monkey Man.  And yet, it is very likely that Kalki 2898 was the first time I had ever actually seen Bachchan act onscreen.  A lot of this is a circumstance of access.  I enjoy the ritual of driving out to Elmwood on the weekends to watch 3-hour Indian action films, but those are all new-release titles.  I’m missing a century’s worth of cinematic context when I watch these modern mutations of the masala genre.  It was fun to see Shah Rukh Khan play two dueling roles in last year’s over-the-top actioner Jawan, for instance, but there are several other examples of him indulging in that one-man special effect from past decades that I’ve entirely missed.  Likewise, any glimpse I’ll get of Bachchan this way will be as an older, gentler man than the roles that made him famous.

Thankfully, I did happen to find a quintessential Angry Young Man title from Bachchan’s back catalog on a used DVD at a local Goodwill.  1975’s Deewaar was an early star-making vehicle for Bachchan, the same year he made Sholay.  He plays a petty criminal who spends his entire life sinning & hustling so that his younger, gentler brother can be properly educated and afford the opportunities he missed.  This dynamic eventually sours when the younger brother (Shashi Kapoor) grows up to become a squeaky-clean cop, assigned by higher-ups to take Bachchan down.  The two boys play tug-of-war with their mother’s affections – the cop living a noble life and the criminal bringing shame on the family, just like their absent father.  The sly moral trick that Deewaar plays is in praising the cop while glorifying the criminal. Sure, Kapoor gets equal screentime against Bachchan, and all of the film’s songs are cutesy romantic trysts hyping him up as a handsome leading man.  It’s Bachchan’s brooding anger as a scrappy fighter who has to work outside the system to thrive that really sells the film’s commercial appeal, though.  He smokes.  He drinks.  He has premarital sex.  He enters his first big fight scene reclined in chair, feet kicked up, and ripping cigs while a gang of nameless goons are foolishly looking for him, about to get all their asses kicked by a single opponent.  Simply put, he’s cool – a true hero of the people.

Because I don’t often have enough context to understand the bigger picture of Indian action cinema as a standalone industry, I’m often left to compare these movies against their closest Hollywood equivalents.  To my uneducated eyes, Kalki 2898 is Prabhas’s Dune; Saaho is Prabhas’s Fast & Furious; Radhe Shyam is Prabhas’s Titanic; etc.  My best understanding of Deewaar, then, was as the Indian equivalent of Blacksploitation pictures of the 1970s.  Bachchan’s stylish, furious rebellion on the impoverished streets of Mumbai recalled American independent pictures of the time like Coffy, SuperFly, and The Mack.  They appear to take inspiration from the same martial arts schlock, if nothing else, and their populist revenge against corrupt elites affords them similar political messaging.  In that context, Bachchan’s anger against an unjust world is totally justified, even if Deewaar still feels the need to wag a finger at the immorality of his crimes.  When Dev Patel can barely suppress his anger with the corrupt policemen who slaughtered his mother and burned his village to the ground long enough to exact his revenge in Monkey Man, he’s brooding in Bachchan’s shadow.  That anger is doubled in S.S. Rajamouli’s recent international hit RRR, in which the unlikely pair of Ram Charan and N.T. Rama Rao Jr. lock biceps to exact revenge on British colonizers, both players struggling to not blow their cover in separate, intertwined Angry Young Men plots.  In Gully Boy, Ranveer Singh raps his way through it.  When I first saw it in theaters, all I could think about was Eminem’s hero arc in 8 Mile; now I’m imagining what it would be like if Bachchan had to battle-rap his way to glory instead of solving problems with his fists.

One interesting variation on the Angry Young Man is in the recent single-location actioner Kill, in which one lone hero fights off an army of murderous thieves on a moving commuter train.  A generic mashup of Snowpiercer & The Raid, Kill‘s entertainment value relies more on the relentless brutality of its violence than on the complexity of its themes.  Since Bachchan was already on my mind, though, I couldn’t help but think about how its Indian army commando hero (Lakshya) both falls in line with and defies the basic tropes of the Angry Young Man archetype.  On the one hand, you would think that because he’s an army brute who beats up petty criminals the entire runtime, he’d be too entrenched in the ruling-class establishment to qualify as a proper Angry Young Man anti-hero.  If anything, the most vicious of the villainous thieves (Raghav Juyal) would’ve filled that role in a better-rounded narrative where he wasn’t such a sadistic psychopath.  And yet, because Lakshya is fighting specifically to protect and avenge a fiancée whose wealthy father wouldn’t allow him to marry because he isn’t of the right caste, I’d say that he at least partially qualifies.  He’s a character defined entirely by his anger, lashing out at the thieves who’ve taken the train hostage with a ferocity that goes from heroic to monstrous as the violence escalates.  At one point, Juyal remarks in wonder that “the commando’s love has dropped on us like a bomb.”  It’s like watching Bachchan’s big one-on-many warehouse fight from Deewaar stretched out to a continuous 100-min action sequence, just with less coherent political messaging behind its thousands of bare-knuckle punches.

Frankly, I also saw a lot of the cheapness of Deewaar reflected in the independent production values of Kill.  By now, Bachchan is internationally famous and starring in the most expensive Indian film productions of all time, like Kalki 2898.  In the 70s, he was still scrappy and hungry, which might mean that the furious brutality of Lakshya’s performance in Kill will lead to bigger roles down the line.  In the meantime, I’ll be busying myself trying to pick up the scraps of Bachchan’s back catalog that I can access at home.  The only reason I got to see Deewaar with English subtitles is because I happened to pick it up at a West Bank thrift store that has since closed down.  Luckily, the more widely remembered Sholay is currently available to stream on Tubi, free with ads.  Not having actually seen an early Bachchan film before now has never stopped me from referencing his Angry Young Man persona in the past, though.  His impact on the go-to narrative tropes of Indian action cinema are evident to even the greenest newcomers.

-Brandon Ledet