Striker Review (2010)

 Cast:

Siddharth, 

Aditya Pancholi,

Padmapriya,

Vidya Malvade, 

Ankur Vikal and Anupam Kher

Director:

Chandan Arora

Plot and Storyline:

Striker is a film that is made for the Indian audiences, or at least for the Indian who would want some resource material to make a foreigner understand what the urban culture of India is all about. The main protagonist of the movie is a board game called Carrom, which has never really been quite popular in the mainstream world. But, in India, Carrom was a game back in the seventies and eighties that could be compared to the Monopolys, and the first handheld video games. 

The film is set in Malvani, which is quite near Malad, again a little place in Mumbai. So small is this place that there are no trains directly going to Malvani  (If Mumbai is a City, there are various areas, known as 'Stations' which have trains travel to and fro) and it is normally referred to as 'Malad Malvani'. 

The movie tells the story of a young boy who lives in Malvani and as most individuals of that age and time, have dreams of going to Dubai. The boy pays some people who do not come true on their words, and it is this singular incident that makes him a pawn in the hands of fate. 

As time progresses, the boy has just one friend of his, who is a drug addict and has been dealing with some antisocial elements but only as a small fry. The movie is quite exhaustive and the scriptwriter has done a good thing by connecting this mass of a story into small bulleted points of the boy trying to reach home during the '92 riots. 

Review:

Very surprisingly, the movie is quite refreshing and even will have a retro aspect to the person who has been living in India in the 80s -90s. The makers have done a very good job of bringing to life the Malad Malvani area of the eighties and nineties, and one almost feels gawkish when they are transferred to a time when the biggest weapon a 'goonda' had was a chopper or a sword, and mobiles were still something that they would dream up of in a drug induced haze. 

The game of carrom is not well known and therefore the carrom centric scenes will not hold the interest of people who are not well versed with either carrom or the culture that they are being introduced to. But we can safely say that carrom was very much a part of the culture and as shown, was the place for the underworld to experiment with the greed of the common man. 

Another good aspect of the movie is that there are fresh faces for almost all the characters Aditya Panscholi has got a meaty role after a long long time and he has done a good job out of it. His characteristic as the younger 'Bhai' are quite realistic to a small time gangster in the '80s. 

However, one negative aspect of the movie is that it lags somewhere in between, and while you know what is happening, you wonder as to why it's happening and whether the protagonist will ever take any action to avenge this or not.  Also, the fact that a movie has been named after a phrase used to describe a  Carrom player gives us the viewer the idea that Carrom would play a  more integral and active role in the movie. However, there is no special plot track that is related to the actual game of Carrom,  just the activity of playing Carrom.

Watch this movie if you want to get a glimpse of urban India before the gory blasts changed everything.