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John Abraham may not have had a very noticeable career as a Bollywood actor but he is going great guns as a producer. Madras café is his second production venture, and he has chosen his theme and his team well (The first one being Vicky donor’, that did very well for itself).
The movie is about the separatist rebel ethnic Tamils in northern Sri-Lanka and their militant
outfit- the LTTE. Although all the key names have been changed in the movie- LTTE is referred
to as LTF and its chief Prabhakaran as Bhaskaran, the decoy is all too evident. The LTTE as of
now is practically non-existent after the death of Prabhakaran, but the sensitivities involved in
he issue can be gauged from the fact that the TN theatre owners have refused to screen this
movie. Not that the film shows any deviation from the truth, and not that LTTE has been shown
in poor light either. In fact, the movie begins with the portrayal of the sorry state of affairs of the
ethnic Tamils in Sri-Lanka. John Abraham plays an Indian military officer, who is chosen by
RAW to carry out covert operations in Sri-Lanka in an attempt to contain the LTTE by hook or
crook. He works independent of the overt Indian attempt in form of ‘Indian peace keeping
force’- the IPKF- a brain-child of the then prime-minister- Rajiv Gandhi (referred in the movie
only as the prime-minister or the ex-prime-minister). While the IPKF fails in its mission and has
to beat a retreat, John Abraham unearths a plot to assassinate the now ex-prime-minister Rajiv
Gandhi (the movie shows the PM to have had resigned his post following IPKF’s failure,
whereas the truth is that he had lost his post to VP Singh following Congress’s defeat in 1989)
The rest of the story is RAW and John Abraham’s attempts to ambush the LTTE’s plan to
assassinate Rajiv Gandhi, and how they fail to prevent the killing in Sriperambadur.
The most attractive part of the movie is the way in which John has been portrayed as a real
RAW agent. Most of the audience would want to believe that military agents and spies are like
James Bond or agent Vinod- completely infallible, heroic, brave-heart, lady charmers and have
the strength of a hulk who can fight thirty villains at one go. John’s character Vikram is a brave
man, but that is all. He has his weaknesses- he is shown to fail; he is shown to be unable to
protect his wife from being murdered, and finally he is shown to fail to prevent his Prime-mini
ster’s assassination. But despite being all this, he comes across as someone who wins the
heart of the audience. In short, he is the real hero, a real human hero.
The female lead is played by Nargis Fakhri who plays a war correspondent for an international
periodical. She helps John in getting leads into the LTTE cadre. Second female lead is Raashi
Khanna, who plays John’s wife, but frankly there’s not much to her role. All she has to do in the
movie is to lament her husband’s constant absence from home to dangerous assignments.
The other important characters are those of the Bala- the LTTE mole in the Indian agency in Sri-L
anka; Anna Bhaskaran, the LTTE chief, and Siddharth Basu, the RAW chief. The character of
Bala is played by a Prakash Belawadi, and he has done his part very well.
Shoojit Sarcar has been brilliant with his direction, so has been Kamaljeet Negi with his
cinematography.
A wonderful movie and a must watch.
My rating- 3.5 on 5
