Keeping this in mind, Godfather is an odd film. Chiranjeevi — known for his acrobatic frollicking and the odd, sweet, compelling ways his limbs swing — does not dance, barring the fingering he and Salman Khan do to Prabhu Deva’s choreography in the end credits. Even the action sequences have a lethargy. They are edited more than they are performed. So you see a shot of Chiranjeevi pulping his various enemies; then, his enemies flying off in various states of undress and duress. We don’t ever get to see this as one continuous action because it never is one continuous action. The beating and the being beaten are separated by the cinematic cut.
I find the dance star and the action star a fascinating figure, because it is one where we can actually see how their existence has made possible the idea that the body could move a certain way. When we see Chiranjeevi, Hrithik Roshan, Shahid Kapoor, Tiger Shroff dance, we see not just an agile body, but a body of possibility, that the human limbs are capable of doing that, and our inability is on us. It is not just awe for something that captures our imagination. It is awe that is dependent deeply on our incapacities, our lethargies.
Godfather, however, has a different trick up its sleeve. In one of its most exciting moments, Chiranjeevi is seated, smiling like Mona Lisa — that disturbing nonchalance, that shameless, unchallenged power — in a jail cell. When his son-in-law, the villain of this movie, the man who put him in jail comes to his cell to gloat, you don’t see Chiranjeevi agitated. When, after speaking like a victor, the son-in-law then tries to make an exit, he realizes the cell is locked from the outside and the guard on duty is not listening to him. The scene now revs. The guard looks at Chiranjeevi instead, for his permission to unbuckle the door. Chiranjeevi swipes his eyes. The guard listens, opening the bolt. That even jailed, he is the one with the power. Perhaps, the mass of mass cinema is located not in actions but in gestures.
Writer and director Mohan Raja melts some of the flab of the source material. For example, he takes two characters from Lucifer — the sibling, the daughter — and makes them one, while using that additional space to create a more sensational world, full of the balletic excess of mass cinema. He also tries to forcefully press humour against the story, which is perhaps a mass cinema thing. My criticism of this film, then, becomes my criticism of the genre itself. Which is to say, Godfather is a thrilling film, whose thrills are undone by its desperate need to pander.
There is also this odd relationship these films have to the North, to Mumbai specifically. Mumbai is this place that is beyond description — this mythical hotspot, this mayanagari full of cloistered, miasmic slums and airy sea links. It is morally depraved. Drugs. Dancing girls. Communalism. It looms large over their imagination, and their economy. Even when the hero needs an outer, greater power to come help him the day — Prithviraj in Lucifer and Salman Khan in Godfather — he comes from Mumbai. Of course Lucifer is more stinging when it comes to its criticism of saffron politics and the pumping corporate currency bedrock on which its success stands. Godfather is too politically meek to make that kind of an assertion.
What does not work in Godfather is Salman Khan’s cameo. One of the most visually striking stretches of Lucifer was Prithviraj bursting trucks of drugs into ash and cinder against the carbon black night. Here, instead, we get Salman Khan fan service, including him riding a bike against a green screen of a night-road lit by the headlamp of his bike. The problem with the kind of stardom Khan has acquired is that you can never see the character, so apparent and insistent is the Salman Khan-ness of Salman Khan. It is the kind of cameo where you remember the kind things he said about Chiranjeevi, about doing this cameo for free, and smile at the camaraderie that brought them together — instead of actually smiling at seeing them together. Because so much of these scenes are not about the scenes per se but what led to it. Towards the end, they hold a machine gun like a baby, swaddling it, and the machine vomits bullets. Some people die. The slow accretion, the loud avalanche of mass scenes comes to an end. The two dance. Roll, end credits.
