First things first, Shikari has Govinda playing his first negative role!
No big secret this, the makers have been tomtoming the fact as well as this fact is known to you from the first scene in the film when Govinda escapes from jail dons a disguise to reach South Africa and kill off a very weatlthy man (Nirmal Pandey).
The rest of the film is about him killing off anyone who realises he committed the first murder.
Lemme talk about a few things first about the genre of the film and it's director N Chandra and then come bac to the film, so stay with me for awhile.
N Chandra made a hard-hitting raw film with total newcomers called Ankush, which was a big hit. It was a honest film. After that he made Pratighaat which made Sujata Mehta a overnight star and was a big hit, quite a mean feat since it was a woman oriented film. He topped off his list with Tezaab, the biggest hit of his career. Since then it has been a downslide for him, not just in terms of the films performance at the BO but the quality of the films per se and their content.
N Chandra is fond of romanticising crime and criminals in his films. But if you start shifting gears and land up in the genre of thrillers in which you try to incorporate the psychological thriller as well as a psychopathic thriller genre and then try to bundle up a sociological reasoning to trim off the black shades in the character and make the audience symthaise with the villian, you have defeated the very purpose you started off with.
What N Chandra does with Shikari is lead you by the hand to show his hero as a real bad guy, and then at the climax of the movie he launches into an intense flashback of the injustice suffered by the villian/hero which have made him thus. It is not just betraying your character but also a bad narrative. The flashback reveals that he was put in jail because he was accused of stealing something. Yet all through the film the word is that a killer escaped from India. But he doesn't commit his first murder till he comes to SA.
To muddle up things further Kiran Kher lands up in SA after being accused of letting Govinda escape and says that 'I will see to it that he is hanged for his crimes'. What crime buddy? Stealing?
Lemme summarise the bare bones of the story without giving away the twist (twist? what twist?). A supposed vicious criminal has escaped from jail, goes to SA to avenge the injustice done to him (the climatic flashback), he also makes the sister (Karisma Kapoor) of man he has murdered fall in love with him.
But this leads to the biggest fault in the script! Govinda was in love with Tabu who was married off to Nirmal Pandey and he escapes to get her back.
But if he kills off Pandey in the first 20 minutes of the film why the hell does he woo Karisma Kapoor? His intention is never to harm her anyway. So shouldn't he be concentrating to wooing the righteous character played by Tabu back in his arms?
The pace of the film is further hampered by the six songs fitted in the film, out of which only two are decent. For the other four sons Chandra creates cliched situations and simply hampers his own narrative.
The story penned by him makes use of too many plot devises which are a mere excuse to cook up something. Johnny Lever's character is simply an excuse to get around sticky situations in the plot of the story. Govinda's entry into Pandey's household is simply too easy.
But what is simply howlarious is when Sushma Seth who is the mother of the murdered Pandey tells Govinda to take away Tabu with him to India since she knows they loved each other. This is not what is funny, the funny thing is that when she says this Tabu is lying unconcious after hearing that Karisma has disappeared and maybe dead. Talk about taking the easy way out!
Since his last film Wajood Chandra has been making his lead actors don various wigs and masks, Nana Patekar did so in Wajood and this time Govinda wears a disguise which looks as fake and clumsy as Dharmendra would look playing a college student.
Govinda however tries his best to infuse a lot of energy into his role and succeeds, however there are parts in which you wish if only Chandra would succeed in toning him now and then since the actor tends to ham a bit too much. Tabu is wasted and so is Karisma though both try to do their best in roles which haven't been properly given enough scenes to mature.
The release of the film just raises one question for me though, how come Maneka Gandhi did not object to the relase of this flick? The beginning of the film has a leading Bollywood actress Karisma Kapoor chasing an endangered specises, Cheetah, on a jeep along with Nirmal Pandey in a helicopter and shooting it dead. And then five minutes in the movie Pandey shoots down his pet dog.
Maneka Gandi put a spanner in the works of Raja Ko Rani Se Pyar Ho Gaya because in the promos Manisha Koirala playfully tugs at the tail of the baby elephant. She screamed cruelty to animals from the rooftops, but showing a cheetah being shot down and a dog dying a dog's death is a different matter I guess since they both happened to be killed in South Africa huh?
The cinematography and editing of Shikari are sleek, the action sequences of the film are done with a lot of panache. To sum up Shikari, I guess it's a movie that has it's moments with very little holding it together. Just In the beginning of the