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Okay, Bollywood has always been known for remaking films from Hollywood, South and other Asian cinema. In the past, our cinema was known to get away with this without many repercussions. However, with the world coming closer thanks to better connectivity and social media, it is easier for the makers of the original films to track if their stuff gets remade without permissions. So many of the Bollywood film-makers, while continuing to look beyond borders for inspirations, are now taking proper copyrights from the original property. So that's great! Jaws, Evil Dead, Basic Instinct, American Pie – 11 Cult Hollywood Movies That Bollywood Dared to Remake and You Never Even Noticed.
Now, let's talk about the remakes we have done in the past. Have we always gone ahead and did a frame-to-frame adaptation? Not exactly. In fact, Bollywood film-makers have always revised the script to suit the sensibilities of the audience here. That doesn't just mean placing the film's premise in an Indian setting. It also means that characters and plot points are tweaked to make things simpler. While the current era is Bollywood is more prone to experimenting in how it depicts its lead characters, in the past the lines between the good and the bad are not as blurred and are more than well-defined.
So many a time, a negative character or a psychopath who is the lead character in a Hollywood or a Southeast Asian movie often ends up getting sanitised in its Bollywood remake. We have 10 such examples below to back our point.
Sangharsh
The Inspired Character: Hannibal Lecter from The Silence of the Lambs
The Tanuja Chandra film is not exactly a complete remake of this Oscar-winning thriller. The adaptation takes huge liberties in how the lead characters are portrayed. Like Akshay Kumar's character is nothing like Anthony Hopkins' Lecter, who is a charming psychopath with cannibalistic pleasures, as dangerous as the killer, Jodie Foster's FBI agent is chasing. In Sangharsh, Kumar's character is jailed for being wrongly accused of a crime he didn't commit and in the end, sacrifices his life to save the woman he loves.
Zinda
The Inspired Character: Lee Woo-jin from OldBoy
Censor Board in India would have baulked if this cult Korean film is remade as it is. Why even Hollywood had to the sanitise some of the darker elements from the original in their version. Sanjay Gupta's film removed all the traces of incest from the original film, while keeping the violence intact. In the process, he also portrayed John Abraham's antagonist as a fairly sympathetic and confused character, whose lengths of taking revenge doesn't exactly match with the humaneness of his behaviour.
Chocolate: Deep Dark Secrets
The Inspired Character: Verbal Kint from The Usual Suspects
The final twist that the stuttering, crippled Verbal Kint (Kevin Spacey) is actually the crime lord Keyser Soze without the limp, is considered one of the best twists of all time. The fact that he is a remorseless, manipulative killer who could have murdered his friends is what stays with you long after the movie is over. In Vivek Agnihotri's decent remake, the entire twist is made a like a con reveal, as Irrfan's version of Kint is not a killer and his friends are still alive, after fooling the authorities over their apparent deaths.
Baazigar
The Inspired Character: Jonathan Corliss from A Kiss Before Dying
Shah Rukh Khan's iconic Ajay Sharma is a killer alright, and the movie doesn't shy away from the fact that he has murdered three innocent people in the film to get his scheme ahead. However, directors Abbas-Mustan gives him a tragic backstory to somewhat balance his bloody vendetta-driven saga. Unlike his counterpart in the Hollywood remake, who just had pure, vile intentions. Seriously, Bollywood, you can't just be killing innocents with any damn sob story!
Raaz
The Inspired Character: Dr Norman Spencer from What Lies Beneath
What Lies Beneath's big twist was that the protagonist's husband had killed his former lover and the spirit of that woman was trying to warn her all along. In Vikram Bhatt's remake, Dino Morea's character is shown as a philandering husband whose mistake was that he had an affair with a girl who was psychotic in nature. She actually commits suicide in the movie, and her spirit seeks vengeance.
Ghajini
The Inspired Character: Leonard Shelby from Memento
Christopher Nolan's Memento is considered as one of the best thrillers of all time, with praises particularly for its non-linear narrative and the final twist. The Bollywood remake, which actually bore more resemblance to the Tamil remake, ditches the complex narrative of the Hollywood film and makes it a pretty straight-faced revenge thriller. Memento had Shelby who convinces himself that he has not killed his wife accidentally because of his amnesia and blames other people and kills them. In Ghajini, Aamir Khan's amnesiac hero is a sweet guy turned killing machine because he has a proper antagonist to face who killed his girlfriend.
Humraaz
The Inspired Character: Steven Taylor from A Perfect Murder
Abbas-Mustan (again) changes a lot of things from the original film in the remake. For example, Viggo Mortensen's character, played by Akshaye Khanna in Humraaaz, is made the actual schemer and the villain in the Bollywood version. While, Michael Douglas' character, played by Bobby Deol in the remake, is made more of a wronged guy, who after hatching the plan to kill his wife, ditches the idea seeing the errors of his ways.
Plan
The Inspired Character: All the Leads from The Suicide Kings
The Suicide Kings had a group of young men kidnap an underworld figure, who turns them against each other before killing half of them. Quite a dark turn, right? Plan, the Bollywood remake starring Sanjay Dutt, Priyanka Chopra and Dino Morea, feels more like a buddy comedy with the kidnapped and the kidnappers turning out to be chums for lives.
Knock Out
The Inspired Character: The Caller from Phone Booth
The Caller only wanted one thing from Colin Farrell's unfaithful, arrogant publicist in Phone Booth - to be honest about his misdemeanours. We really don't know anything about his background, or why he is doing so. In the Bollywood remake, Dutt's character is torturing Irrfan's because of one favourite Bollywood trope - patriotism.
Kaante
The Inspired Character: All The Leads From Reservoir Dogs
Yes, the lead characters in Sanjay Dutt's film are robbers and thieves and cop-torturers. However, nearly every one of them has a very humane reason to commit the bank robbery. One has to treat his dying wife, other has a handicapped sister, while the third has a girlfriend he has to take care of. Because when it comes to family, every wrong feels right.
(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Apr 08, 2019 05:12 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).
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