Ek Villain Returns is the latest in Bollywood's long tradition of terrible Korean remakes

In 2014, director Mohit Suri released the serial killer movie Ek Villain, starring Sidharth Malhotra , Shraddha Kapoor and Riteish Deshmukh. Deshmukh played the serial killer in question, an emasculated taxi driver called Rakesh Mahadkar. We are told that Rakesh’s wife is in the habit of berating and belittling him on a daily basis, which has driven him to stalk and then murder a string of young women. The film was, let’s say, heavily inspired by the South Korean serial killer movie I Saw the Devil (2010), one of the scariest movies you’ll ever see and a representative example of the kind of gore-heavy, psychological horror that Korean cinema excels in. Sadly, Ek Villain was a pale copy of the original, despite a surprisingly effective performance by Deshmukh. The screenplay did the actors no service, and this is an even bigger problem in the film’s recently released ‘spiritual sequel’ Ek Villain Returns , which was released theatrically on Friday. John Abraham stars as Bhairav Purohit, a similarly psychotic taxi driver who may or may not be the serial killer — this time, the other leading man Gautam Mehra (Arjun Kapoor) is a kind-of-equal contender for the dubious honour. This dangling carrot of suspense is not nearly enough, however, to rescue Ek Villain Returns: Abraham’s typically wooden performance is matched by an equally dull, uninspired outing by Arjun Kapoor who really ought to start picking better scripts. Ek Villain Returns, then, marks yet another occasion where Bollywood has tried and failed spectacularly at adapting hit South Korean movies, especially in the thriller and horror genres. In most of these failed attempts, the core problems remain the same — a weak screenplay, a distinct lack of uniquely Indian elements and failure to grasp the tonality of the original story. Adapt or perish: Zinda and Awarapan    Perhaps Bollywood’s first-ever high-profile South Korean remake, Sanjay Gupta’s 2006 action-thriller Zinda, starring Sanjay Dutt and John Abraham, was not all bad. The ‘inspiration’ for the film was the Park Chan-wook classic Oldboy (2003), which starred Choi Min-sik as a man who has been imprisoned for 15 years in a cell that resembles a hotel room, fed the same meal (a plate of wontons) over and over again. The captive uses the time to train himself in martial arts (remarkably, picked up from movies that played on the TV in his cell), swearing vengeance upon whoever robbed him of 15 years of his life. Oldboy had become a runaway critical and commercial hit upon its release, eventually winning the Grand Prix at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival, with the president of the jury Quentin Tarantino hailing it as one of the best thrillers he had ever seen. Gupta retained most of the key elements of the film — changing one major subplot involving incest because, let’s face it, 2004 Bollywood was not nearly ready for that particular conversation (not that 2022 Bollywood is ready either, it has to be said). The film’s cinematography was particularly strong (if a little gimmicky), faithfully adapting the original’s neo-noir sensibilities to the back-alleys of Bangkok, where the film was set. Cinematographer Sanjay F. Gupta, whose own directorial venture Karam also starred John Abraham, did a fine job with these greytone-heavy sequences. Oldboy’s famous hammer-fight sequence, which plays out in a single take, was duly recreated here and Sanjay Dutt did a great job, fighting his way out of a dungeon against scores of goons. All in all, the first half of the film shaped up quite nicely. Sadly, where Zinda lost the plot, literally and figuratively, was the second half, where the screenplay devolved into a series of cliches and melodramatic excesses, with the actors barely able to catch up with the abrupt emotional escalation. From neo-noir thriller territory, the film took a sharp right turn towards familiar overblown Bollywood territory, with lengthy bits of exposition that slowed the action down to a grinding halt. Zinda, therefore, counts as an almost-there, exemplifying the promising adaptation that loses its way and ends up as a mediocrity, despite outlier performances. Something very similar happened with Mohit Suri’s Awarapan (2007), starring Emraan Hashmi as a cynical, world-weary Hong Kong gangster who has turned his back on God and tends to believe the worst in people after his one true love Aaliyah (Shriya Saran) dies of a bullet intended for him. The film was an unofficial remake of the 2005 South Korean action movie A Bittersweet Life, which starred Lee Byung-hun in the role that would make his name and land him plum roles in big-ticket movies like I Saw the Devil, the Bruce Willis thriller Red 2 and the recent Netflix smash hit show Squid Game. Like Zinda, what Awarapan had going for it was a strong first half and an even stronger lead performance by Emraan Hashmi, for whom this was probably a career-best performance at this stage ie 2007 (since then, of course, Hashmi has done a bunch of stellar roles including Dibakar Banerjee’s Shanghai). Hashmi’s hooded eyes and supremely disdainful body language went a long way in conveying his character’s current-day cynicism. But he was even better when this cynicism is replaced by a sense of purpose — rescuing his mob boss’s ex-girlfriend Reema (Mrinalini Sharma) from capture and execution and whisking her away from Hong Kong. And just like Zinda, the second half was a massive disappointment, with the plot seemingly incorporating every single cinematic double-cross manoeuvre it could think of. Emraan, too, looked far too lost to hold the film together and it sputtered to an unappetising end. Too many cooks, not enough ideas     The period between 2011 and 2016 saw a profusion of South Korean remakes in Bollywood. It was as though there had been a meeting where producers had agreed not to write original stories for a while. Most of these remakes were uniformly terrible from beginning to end. Unless Zinda or Awarapan, there were no silver linings in sight here, in the form of outlier performances or strong technical work. Worse, most of these films tried to do too many things, aping far too many sources all at once, with disastrous results. A classic example of that last problem was 2011’s Murder 2, starring Emraan Hashmi once again, this time as an atheist, corrupt cop investigating a serial killer called Dheeraj Pandey (Prashant Narayanan) who entraps, tortures and murders young female sex workers. Take a gander at the list of ‘influences’ here: the film’s basic storyline is lifted wholesale from the 2008 South Korean thriller The Chaser, a vastly superior movie. Producer Mahesh Bhatt claimed that the film’s characters were inspired by the real-world Nithari murders of 2006 (Nithari is a village near Sector-31, Noida, Uttar Pradesh). When we are introduced to the villain Dheeraj Pandey, he spouts a bunch of inane dialogues about femininity and wanting to both be a woman and punish women for being “too beautiful for this world”. As cinephiles will recognise instantly, this is a little too close to the infamous Buffalo Bill, the serial killer villain of the classic 1991 horror movie Silence of the Lambs, portrayed by Ted Levine. For good measure, the film’s poster was a shameless copy of the poster for the Lars von Trier movie Antichrist (2009). What chance do you have as a filmmaker when your screenplay is pulled, magnet-like to three such strong, intricate and tonally disparate narratives? It’s no wonder that Murder 2 was all over the place, visually and otherwise. Starting 2015, the South Korean remakes came thick and fast, with nary a watchable scene between them. Aishwarya Rai botched her comeback bigtime with Jazbaa (2015), an insipid kidnapping thriller that was a remake of the South Korean thriller Seven Days (2007). Akshay Kumar’s comedic timing could not rescue Singh is Bliing (2015), a typically brainless caper by actor-director Prabhu Deva (who specializes in bottom-tier action comedies these days) failed to recreate the easygoing fun of its original, the South Korean comedy My Wife is a Gangster. Randeep Hooda tried his best in the romantic drama Do Lafzon Ki Kahani (2016), a remake of the Korean drama Forever, but the film’s confused writing lurched between dramatic and inane far too many times. The turkeys kept on coming with 2016’s Teen, which was an official remake of the South Korean thriller Montage—notably, Teen managed to waste the talents of both Amitabh Bachchan and Nawazuddin Siddiqui. John Abraham, the patron saint of Korean remakes at this point, delivered another sleepwalking performance in the paint-by-numbers action thriller Rocky Handsome (2016). In recent years, Salman Khan has delivered two South Korean remakes, and it’s difficult to pick which was worse: the 2019 period drama Bharat or the 2021 action thriller Radhe, both of them being commercial failures as well. In this history of failures, then, we can add Mohit Suri’s Ek Villain Returns, which actually becomes a little bit fun towards the end, when you’re watching ironically, with a view towards placing the movie in the ‘hate-watch’ or ‘so bad it’s awesome’ club. As for an actual, honest-to-God decently made remake of a South Korean remake, we’ll have to wait a bit longer. Aditya Mani Jha is a Delhi-based independent writer and journalist, currently working on a book of essays on Indian comics and graphic novels. Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News ,  India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.