Ghajini - Review

Watched Ghajini last Saturday in Bangalore. The advantage of watching a newly released Tamil movie in Bangalore is that you need to reach the theater just 5 minutes early to get the tickets. I hear that in Chennai and most of the other places in Tamilnadu, the theaters are packed for the next two weeks.

Spoiler Warning: Entire movie, with plots, sub-plots, twists and climax discussed below.

The movie starts off with Chitra (Nayanthara), a medical student who wants to do a project on patients with brain damage. Her perusal through the files on brain patients leads her to one 29 year old Sanjay Ramaswamy. Sanjay suffers from anterograde amnesia, a condition wherein a person is not able to convert short term memory into long term, due to some head injury. Sanjay memory lasts 15 minutes.

Chitra expresses her desire of doing her project based on Sanjay’s condition to her professor. The professor tells her that it might not be a good idea, since Sanjay’s case is still an unproven police case, and if she gets entangled with him, then it might prove to be disastrous to her career. Chitra gives up her idea, and the storyline switches to Sanjay.

Sanjay (Surya) is busy bashing up an unidentified person. After killing him, Sanjay takes out a set of photographs, and tries to identify him. There is a photograph of the person whom he has killed and Sanjay crosses out the photograph. Sanjay leaves the scene.

The police detect the crime and comes out with full force to unearth the murderer. The police officer, played by Riyaz Khan, gets a bus ticket from the scene. On its backside, he notices that someone has written 3/100. He woes that he will get to the person who committed the murder in a few days time.

In the meantime, we get to know that the person who is killed is a gangster, whose boss (Pradeep Rawat) is worried about the fact that he is the second person killed from in a week.

The story again goes back to Sanjay, who uses another set of photographs to get back to his house. He identifies his flats as well as the watchman using Polaroid photographs. He enters his flat, and his house is full of maps and photographs. His daily life is a struggle and we also get to know that his ultimate aim is to kill the leader of the gangsters he has killed till now. To get to his ultimate aim, he uses photographs and body tattoos to keep track of various events in his life, since he knows that he would forget things in 15 minutes.

Meanwhile, the cop, identifies the conductor of the bus who issued the tickets. The conductor says that he can identify the person Riyaz manages to get to Sanjay’s flat, and after a surprise attack, manages to overpower him and tie him to a chair.

Our intelligent cop, instead of calling for backup, starts searching the house. He stumbles on a diary of the year 2002. He opens it to find a photograph of Sanjay, as a handsome guy, unlike the present state. He starts reading the diary, and that’s how we come to know of Sanjay’s past. For some strange reason, the cop still has not called for backup and instead reads the diary.

The diary tells the story of Sanjay Ramaswamy, owner of Air Voice Telecom. He has huge plans for India, and is busy building a telecom empire. The diary also speaks of Kalpana (Asin), a small time ad-model, who is struggling to make it big.

A small confusion by the employees of Sanjay forces Kalpana to feign in front of producers that she is the girlfriend of Sanjay. Kalpana is able to get better roles and is achieving what she had aspired for, until the news is broken by a magazine. Sanjay is furious to learn about it and goes to meet his so called girlfriend. On the way, he sees Kalpana helping a few handicapped children and falls for her, without knowing the fact that she is the girl who has spread rumors about him.

When he reaches the studio where Kalpana is doing her shootout, he recognizes the girl. Kalpana had not seen Sanjay before and she mistakes him for a struggling actor. Sanjay plays along and they become good friends. Many hilarious situations follows and we see that Sanjay is falling in love with Kalpana. On New Years eve, Sanjay confesses his love to Sanjana, who asks for sometime to tell her decision.

The diary ends here, and the cop bewildered for not getting the entire story starts searching frantically for the diary of the year 2003. Even now, he is least interested in calling for backup. He finds the diary for 2003, and as he is about to start reading, as Sanjay breaks free and ties up the cop.

With no one after him, Sanjay makes another attempt at killing the gang leader, only to kill another of his gang member, who divulges to the gang leader that someone is trying to kill him. The gang leader goes about killing anyone who had or would be having a grudge against him, but still he has an intuition that his attacker is still on the loose.

Meanwhile, Chitra stumbles upon Sanjay and befriends him. On one such occasion, she goes to his flat, and finds it unlocked and unoccupied. This is also surprising, but let’s not ask questions.

She goes about searching the house, and learn of the murderous intent of Sanjay, she also finds the cop gagged in one of the cupboards. Sanjay enters the scene, and starts chasing the cop, who meeting with an accident while he is on the run and is killed. Now, Sanjay starts following Chitra, who makes use of Sanjay’s amnesia to escape from him.

Chitra is unaware of the facts, and goes and meets with the gang leader to tell him the details of the person who had made many attempts to kill him. With the identity of his to be nemesis in hand, the gang leader plots to kill Sanjay. Buy Sanjay has other ideas, and he lands in the gang leaders house, only to realize that the gang leader has an identical twin. Before he can make a note of it, Chitra calls the gang leader to tell him to remove her photograph that Sanjay had to identify her as his friend and hand it over to her. Sanjay picks up the call and notes her address.

Sanjay lands at Chitra’s hostel and attempts to accost her. Instead he is trapped, and taken into police custody.

Now comes the dialogue of the movie. The police chief, looks at the tattoos in Sanjays body and says, “All these numbers are 10 digit, so they must be cell phone numbers. If we call these numbers, we can get his identity.” The entire movie hall was rolling with laughter, and I felt like kicking the person who wrote this dialogue.

One of the phone numbers is that of the gang leader, who is forced to pose as his friend. Just then Sanjay’s doctor and lawyers appear and take him home.

The gang leader attacks him at his home, but he is unable to kill him, due to the fear of police getting back to him as he has earlier made a statement to police that he was Sanjay’s friend. So he decides to wipe all evidences from Sanjay’s life which would link the gang leader to Sanjay. So he destroys all photographs, maps and defaces the tattoos.

Chitra suddenly remembers that she had taken the diary from Sanjay’s house, while she had entered it earlier. I think she was also suffered a bout of amnesia and forgot about the diary. So she starts reading it.

Now the viewers learn the remaining part of Sanjay’s story.

Kalpana also confesses that she is in love with him, and they decide to marry. Even now, Sanjay had not revealed his true identity to her, and as he was about to do that, he gets a call to attend an urgent meeting in London. Kalpana also gets a call to attend a shooting in Mumbai.

The diary ends here. Chitra is moved by Sanjay’s story and investigates. She sees a news article on one of the old newspaper she unearthed at her library, which leads her to a school kid as well as a female police office. They tell her the remaining story.

On her way to Mumbai, she rescues a set of girls who were being taken to Mumbai to be sold. Her rescue attempts and daredevilry is praised by the media, but incurs the wrath of the gang leader, who lost money due to Kalpana’s benevolent attitude.

Sanjay returns and is about to reveal his true identity, only to find that Kalpana being attacked by the gang. He tries in vain to save her, but fails. The gang leader kills Kalpana and lands the terrible blow, which makes Sanjay and amnesiac.

After reading the story, Chitra is filled with remorse, and what follows now is utter mayhem. I lost track of the movie after it, since it was plain masala stuff. To say it in simple words, with Chitra’s help Sanjay tracks the villain and hands him over to the cops.

A few words about various people behind the movie.

The director has made a good attempt at Ghajini. Though he takes his inspiration from a Hollywood flick Memento, he has added a lot of songs, action and drama to a simple story. But he has done a good job.

Surya is amazing. He is growing as an action hero. I became his fan after watching Kaaka Kaaka. His career is bound to leap manifolds after this movie.

Asin has done well in her role. Her romance with Sanjay is the best part of the movie.

Nayathara is the only sore point of the movie. After having watched many Malayalam movies where she played many good roles, it was unimaginable for me to see her dance in “X Macchi... Y Macchi...”. She looked so fat and those skimpy clothes made her look like one of the many item number dancers. Also in the final scenes, while she was running away from the villains, getting drenched in the rain wearing a white shirt, it looked more as if she was there in the movie to show flesh rather than to act. I hope this movie does not become a black spot in her career.

The songs were not so great. Two of the songs are real catchy, “Sutrum Vizhi…” and “Oru Maalai…”. Background score was a total failure. There were a few tunes taken from Matrix, and the music failed to capture the thrill and feel of the movie.

Overall a good watch, and definitely worth the money spent.