Meeruthiya Gangsters review: Part Tarantino, some Anurag Kashyap and a lot of dark comedy

Take Anurag Kashyap’s Gangs of Wasseypur and Ugly. Tone down the violence, cut out the gore and the abusive language; replace the dark and disgusting characters with less dark, less disgusting ones; give them some funny lines. Now take Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, shoddily duplicate the opening scene in its shot taking, use a cut human ear as a reference to the same. Finally, cast some good actors and put it all together in a real context of India’s badland, Meerut. The outcome is Meeruthiya Gangsters, an amateurish, tame, but a decently indecent and comic film in which guns are actually fun. Meet the mad, bad and reckless bunch of goons of Meerut, known for its lawlessness and daily crimes. Co-written by Zeishan Quadri, who was one of the writers of Gangs of Wasseypur, Meeruthiya Gangsters is also Quadri’s first film. [caption id=“attachment_2439416” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Still from the film.[/caption] In the introductory scene, distractingly shot in amateur round trolley moves, we learn this gang of friends have recently made news as the unidentified thieves who stole a car and even snatched a baby’s Cerelac in the process. Nikhil (Jaideep Ahlawat, nicely underplayed), the brains in the group, is the one who makes the plans. Amit (Aakash Dahiya) is the sly prankster. Rahul (Chandrachur Rai) is the alcoholic who knows Power Point. Gagan (Vansh Bhardwaj) is the romantic who will pick up a fight with Nikhil for his sassy and sexy receptionist girlfriend, Mansi (Nushrat Bharucha, perfectly cast). Sunny (Shadab Kamal) is the eccentric who randomly breaks bottles on people’s heads and goes ballistic. Above them all is the shameless and sharp Mamaji (Sanjay Sharma), who gives damaged TV sets as wedding gifts. The world whirls on a slightly tilted axis in Quadri’s Meerut. Sample this conversation: Sanjay ‘Foreigner’ (Jatin Sarna, gangster number one) with orange hair (a reference to Reservoir Dogs’ Mr Orange perhaps?) is on the phone, arguing how his girlfriend, Alka (Soundarya Sharma) looks two years older than him. He hangs up and tells his friends that a warrant has been issued against him because Alka’s father’s says Alka is a minor. No one reacts to the warrant. Instead, one of Sanjay’s friends says, “Tujhse do saal badi dikhti hai.” “Yehi to main keh raha tha,” whines Sanjay. Now that the important age issue is settled, Sanjay Foreigner strolls over casually to Nikhil, who is chilling inside a water tank with his beer, and says, “Bhai, main kya bol raho hoon na…. (pause) tum mujhe na, goli maardo. Aaj sham hi maar do, bhai.” Nikhil glugs from his bottle and replies, equally casually, “World Cup final hai, India-Sri Lanka.” Sanjay Foreigner is initially a little miffed. “World Cup mujhse bada ho gaya?” he whines. “Bhai, please maar do bhai sham mein.” Then Sanjay goes on to point out how it won’t take long to murder him and that Nikhil can catch the crucial bits of the match after shooting Sanjay. It’s not as though Sanjay and his friends don’t care about each other. Actually, they care so much for one another that they’ll risk arrest in order to find a sliced earlobe in the middle of all the rubbish and rubble of a bar brawl. Once our desi gangsters are done with small, rash robberies and smashing glasses at cinema halls, they move on to big fish: kidnapping. It’s only with the final kidnapping that the previous sequences of disconnected but hilarious scenes finally come together to form some semblance of a plot. The edit (with Kashyap as co-editor) is as indulgent as the writing. Just when you think there is a story after all, the script throws in a whammy, just like the sanki Sunny. The boys’ adversary in Meeruthiya Gangsters is Inspector RK Singh (a deliciously roguish Mukul Dev) whose belt is the only sign of his police uniform. Inspector Singh has long, unruly hair and an attitude more dabanggthan Salman Khan’s, and little time for bureaucracy and paperwork. Don’t look too hard for connectivity, logic and serious subtexts. It’s better to enjoy the randomness of Meeruthiya Gangsters and keep your eye on the important details, like Quadri’s heroes do when they ponder upon the whiteness of white underwear and discuss whether grey stripes on a white shirt make it less white.