Dangal  :

In an entertainment market where cheap goods are dispensed every Friday to exploit the lack of options of the Junta, Dangal surely does an honest job. It is not a movie with the sole purpose of fleecing the people off their entertainment budget but to give them their money's worth of genuine entertainment.

But to be sure, it does just that. It is not a statement against women's exploitation or female foeticide. It is a film primarily about wrestling, and if you are a sports lover, who liked soccer, tennis or cricket earlier, there is a good chance you will acquire love for a new sport here.

The movie brings out the nuances of a sport that comes across to the uninitiated as people pushing , pulling and throwing each other around. But this film shows that wrestling can be a a skilled sport. The wrestling scenes are indeed the crowning glory of this film. The way these scenes capture the skill involved in wrestling as the players hold the opponent, position themselves or move their body around strategically is truly remarkable.

The raw animal appeal of the sport really comes through in these scenes as the players resist being toppled by the other or avoid being captured, or contort themselves in certain ways to toss the opponent on her back.

That then is the central focus of the film although there is an overlay of a father child relationship in which the child starts outgrowing the parent only to realise later that Dad is always right. There are miscellaneous other entertaining elements like the elder cousin brother who gives more than a single occasion for a genuine laugh.

However Dangal does not live upto anything close to its billing of being a radically new and different film. It is a sports movie, which has been done well, a la Chak de India, which I think was surely better than this. In fact when I heard the movie title, I thought it is about a social uprising of sorts. But I was a bit disappointed when I discovered it has nothing to do with broad sweeping social changes but about a theme that is relatively mundane i.e about how two girls are groomed into wrestling in a social setting where women generally do not play such sports.

For me the film was a good one time watch. A bit about the acting now. I have no hesitation in saying that Amir Khan is one the most overrated actors around after having watched Dangal.

He does not merge quite as much into the character as one would like given that he is the central character in the film. By comparison the youngest Gita and Babita have done a good job. The young Gita, Zaira Wasim is quite a natural. Both while playing the shy hesitant village girl or the wrestler who just made her first mark in the sport by winning the local tournament, Zaira plays her part to the T. The young Babita is not quite given enough screen time, but whatever little she gets, she plays it well. Coming now to Sakshi Tanwar, the familiar face of Saas Bahu serials. I did not expect much from Saskhi, but I must say I have been pleasantly surprised with her acting skills. She plays the Haryanvi housewife who is circumspect about the antics of her Husband really well. She has got the Haryanvi accent perfectly as well. The nephew both young and the elder one are both good actors, with good comic timing. I would say the track of the nephew is the most entertaining element in the film. If acting like a Haryanvi simpleton is hard, making people laugh by doing so is even harder. I don't know the names of both the young and the older cousin, but both actors deserve a pat on the back for successfully making us laugh. Lastly amongst the other big winners in the film is the casting, other than the older Gita, who looks too urbane to play a village wrestling woman, the rest of the cast is perfect. I wish Amir would have done a better job, and got rid of his signature head cocking, and other intonational gestures and the film had more about the situation of women in a backward state like Haryana, and it would have been a far more entertaining film than it has turned out to be.