By Soumyadipta Banerjee

We call them cinematic liberties. The term basically means that a film’s script can change the reality portrayed on the big screen. When we go for a Bollywood film, our brain is trained not to react adversely when we see a hero taking down five people with a single blow or flying through the air only to land a kick that in turn sends another villain flying through the air. But what happens when we are told that the story is actually a real story? Nah! We expect the film to be as close to reality as possible. We don’t expect the hero to fight like Rajnikanth but take blows on his chin like ‘normal’ people. The problem is: The movie starts assuming ‘Bollywoodic’ proportions when you expect it to be portraying what happened in the city between 2003 to 2008.

We will now tell you what we know and how Maximum starts altering the reality through Sonu Sood…

1. The Blackberry Torch was invented in 2003
Though the company sets the date of the launch as 2010, the film shows that Blackberry Torch was invented in 2003. Arya Babbar, who plays a builder’s son and one who constantly plots to kill Sonu Sood, flaunts the mobile handset in one of the introductory scenes of the film. This man, who doesn’t have too many emotions to show, has a constant angry look pasted across his face which makes you feel that he might whip out a pencil knife and threaten you any moment. But all he does is to switch over to a different phone next time. As we see it, he makes another phone call in the year 2008 but then he uses a Samsung phone that was launched in 2001! Don’t question it because it’s a liberty and Kabeer Kaushik has the license because he is the director.

2. Mumbai local trains were painted white and purple in 2003
People who breathed in Mumbai in 2009 know that all local trains on the Western line were of blue and white hue while the others were maroon. Never mind this faltu but real fact.
Maximum says that Mumbai’s local trains turned purple quite a long back and in 2003, these purple trains were on full throttle on Mumbai’s tracks. We see Sonu Sood jumping down a bridge and catching a gangster in 2003 but the train shown is of 2010. We felt that what Kabeer Kaushik really wanted to tell us through this film is that Sonu Sood was dreaming and something pretty much like (the Hollywood film) Inception happened to him. Sonu Sood travels in his dreams to 2012 and catches a gangster who was hiding in a local train. What does he do next? He plays Rummy with the gangster and when he starts losing the game, he kills him. In the next scene, he again loses a game of Scrabble to his wife (played by Neha Dhupia) and she calls him a bad loser. Lucky her! She was not playing cards with him, otherwise…

3. Bollywood heroines in 2005 loved PDA with police officers
The dashing police officer Pandit (that’s Sonu’s pyara sa naam in the film) goes into the vanity van of a heroine to speak to the producer and they meet! Sonu casts such a Harry Potter like love-spell through his eyes that the actress immediately starts feeling horny. The spell has such a strong reaction on the lady that whenever she sees Sonu, she starts a marathon session of PDA (Public Display of Affection) with him. She goes to a party where she sees Sonu again and immediately she feels like the woman who is awestruck with the Raymond man. Like what we see in the Raymond ads, she goes ahead and starts rubbing her palm on Sonu’s jacket. No, she didn’t have Biriyani grease on her palm but that is the way actresses used to behave in 2003. Unbelievable? Believe it!

4. TV reporters, politicians and policemen made a great team in 2003
There is a smiling TV reporter who gets amazing access to Sonu Sood, the controversial cop. He gets to eat kheema-pao with him every alternate day and then he becomes so close to him that he even starts sharing his most intimate secrets. Now, add to that a neta who chooses to be Sonu’s Godfather and starts helping him. All of this happens without any apparent reason. The three bond over being ‘outsiders’ in Mumbai but hey, none of them get into corrupt practices. Yes, all of them can be dosts for sure but the kind of dosti that has been shown in the film can only happen when Sonu Sood is dreaming. We are reiterating an earlier point because we think Kabeer Kaushik forgot to show that Sonu Sood was dreaming. What’s more? The smiling reporter never takes any favours from anybody and yet continues to everybody’s favourite. Well, that’s another world!

5. Police used to carry their revolvers tucked in their belts in 2003
Imagine that you have tucked your revolver, nozzle down, in the front-buckle of your belt and suddenly it fires! Luckily for Sonu Sood that gun never fired but that didn’t stop him from roaming around with the butt of his revolver jutting out of his zipper line. He even goes into the night-club like that and starts dancing. We lived in 2003 too but we never saw any cop dance like that in any bar. It’s actually dangerous, you see! Forget about police rule of carrying a gun in public, you will never see a cop carry a gun like that simply because it’s dangerous for their intimate organs.

That is not all…

Neha Dhupia is his wife and she starts explaining why she is a Bharatiya Nari and Vinay Pathak turns out to be a an evil politician who gives a long lecture before he finally dies after being shot.

Why you should not watch the film
We think you should watch the film only if you want to get away from Mumbai's traffic. After all, that is the only thing that has not changed in Mumbai since 2003.

PS: Oh! Sorry, sorry! We forgot to tell you that there’s a small bit of animation in the film too. And we are not only referring to the Amalipuram item song here!

in.com rating: 1/5

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