Movie Review: Guru

Guru is the story of Gurukant Desai (Abhishek Bachchan), a street-smart adolescent in a small village in Gujarat, India. After failing his exams in school and yet another tiff with his father, he leaves for Turkey to take up a job there. A few years later, fed up of working for the "goras", he returns to India where he gets married to Sujata (Aishwarya Rai). He uses her dowry to start up a business in polyester. As his business grows, he gets involved in increasingly murky dealings. Eventually, the owner of a newspaper Nanaji(Mithun Chakraborty), who once was like a father to Guru, realizes the extent of corruption prevalent in Guru's company and is determined to bring him to justice with the help of his trusty editor Shyam (Mahadevan). Guru is required to appear before a commission where after a rousing speech, in typical Bollywood candy-floss manner, he is let off with only a minor fine.

As I wrote the above summary, I realized that there really isn't much going on during the almost-3-hour movie. It could have been mind-numbingly boring were it not for Abhishek Bachchan, who really gives a wonderful performance. He effortlessly portrays Guru as a man with naive arrogance, boyish exuberance, steely determination and almost frightening ambition and ruthlessness, and makes him quite likable. Even though there were moments when one could see the Amitabh Bachchan in him (which isn't necessarily a bad thing), one can see that he has come into his own. Aishwarya Rai, for a change, is pretty good as well. She doesn't giggle or ham, and the difference between her in Guru and in Dhoom 2 is remarkable. Mithun Chakraborty and Mahadevan are pretty good. Vidya Balan's character in the movie did not add anything substantial to it and was quite pointless.

AR Rehman's music was pleasing, though a couple of songs were redundant and misplaced. Mani Ratnam has again given us an eminently watchable movie with some stellar performances. While tighter editing would have helped, Guru is one of the better Bollywood movies I've watched in a long time.

Rating: ***

[Rating Scale:
****: What a fantastic movie!
*** : Pretty good. Could be better, but not bad at all.
** : Below average. Snooze fest.
* : Seriously, what were they thinking? How dare they put their audience through such hell? This movie should really never have been made. I want my money back!]