Allah Ke Banday Movie Reviews

The Oscar winning Brazilian film, Children of God has been inspiration for many Indian film makers who have chosen to interpret the life of the children who fight their way through the ill-famed favelas through the experiences of Dharavi's kids. Faruk Kabir too may have been inspired by the landmark classic but his idiom and his interpretation of child exploitation is completely his own. The film is a hard-hitting, gritty account of growing up in a dangerous place

"ALLAH KE BANDAY pays homage to all the kids exposed to offense, misdeeds and crime," debutant director Faruk Kabir announced to me when he screened for me the first promo of his film. In times when senseless comedies, rom-coms and thrillers are being lapped up at the box-office, here comes a director telling a realistic story of a bunch of bad young men taking up guns when they are preordained to take up education, taking up abhorrence

Over the years, many a filmmaker has chosen the slums of Mumbai as the backdrop for his or her film, be it Yash Chopra (Deewar, 1975), Mira Nair (Salaam Bombay, 1988) or Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire, 2008). Now, Faruk Kabir gets down and dirty with his directorial (and acting) debut Allah Ke Banday. Bhool Bhulaiya (read: Dharavi, Mumbai’s largest slum) is home to thriving textile, pottery and leather industries, not to mention the grisly crime scene

"Asia’s biggest slum” Dharavi, many believe, is not even the largest slum of Mumbai. Vast stretches of shanties called Mankhurd, further north from Dharavi, is much denser; Mira Road and thereabouts in Mumbai’s northwest is as huge, if not huger. Dharavi is still the urban ‘povertariat’s’ favourite slum. The lower deck of Mumbai, the leading men of this film belong to, is called Bhul-Bhulaiya. Gruesome crimes, kids with country-made and automatic weapons

Guns gleam like brand new toys in Allah Ke Banday, held as they are by a strategically young army of muhalla marauders. Strategic not just because child criminals can run faster and mingle into crowds easier, but strategic because it lets director Faruk Kabir pretend that his protagonists, a couple of scumbags, are actual heroes. They aren't, but Kabir desperately wants you to believe that in his script, a complete tribute to 70s Bollywood

Two young boys are sent to a remand home for a murder they didn’t commit. Much abuse is heaped upon them by a sadistic warden and his cohorts ; when they come out after several years, they’ve got crime on their minds. Some of ‘Allah Ke Banday’ reminds you of ‘Sleepers’; some of it is ‘City Of God’; it also references several recent similarly themed Hindi films touching upon the slumkids-crime-life axis

An evocatively titled gangster film, Allah ke Banday makes an interesting start, then rapidly descends into the usual mix of guns and goons, each more bloody and violent than the other. Fully filmy in its obvious telling, Allah ke Banday is set in the mean chawls of Mumbai, packed with over cooked back ground music, bombastic street dialogue and cussed goons.

Good performances by Sharman Joshi and Naseeruddin Shah but Allah Ke Banday will be a non-starter as its screenpla...