Such a movie is usually the product of clumsiness, lack of skill or lack of caring (or if you're Rob Zombie, Paul Haggis or Eli Roth, all three). Deft moviemakers and actors can often work within the constraints of their style to create films that are enjoyable and might offer a comment or two on the human condition.
Director Takashi Nomura, adapting a noir crime novel by Shinji Fujiwara and working with Japanese action-gangster stalwart Joe Shishido, does just that in his 1967 Nikkatsu production A Colt is My Passport. Shuji Kamimura (Shishido) and his partner Shun Shiozaki (Jerry Fujio, who looks a lot like Tommy Lee Jones) have pulled off a mob hit and are trying to leave the country to lie low for awhile. But the yakuza organization whose leader they killed has many resources and is hot on their trail. Shuji and Shun wait for transport out of the country in a rundown dockside hotel, where they meet the waitress Mina (Chitose Koboyashi). She might help them, or her own ties to to the underworld might get them killed.
The title sounds more like a gritty Western, and Nomura and music director Harumi Ibe supply a score heavily influenced by spaghetti westerns as well. The meshing of styles works better than a first thought might suggest, and offers some room for considering how the Wild West of our stories and imaginations might fit into a modern society: Would the characters John Wayne played in movies be inside or outside the law as we have it today? Would the criminal Shishido plays still be a criminal if he were on a dusty street ready to pull his six-shooter instead of in a Tokyo apartment pinpointing his target through a high-powered rifle scope?
Passport can certainly prompt such questions, but even if you don't want to mess with them you can still enjoy the hard-boiled crime drama that was bread-and-butter for both Nikkatsu and Shishido through the 1960s and early 1970s.
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Welcome to spy movies, Bollywood-style, in the 2003 thriller The Hero: Love Story of a Spy.
Top agent and master of disguise Arun Sharma has to thwart the designs of terrorist Ishaq Khan, who has access to nuclear material through rogue elements in his own Pakistani government. Khan wants to complete a nuclear weapon and when Arun's efforts derail his plans, he has to relocate to Canada. Arun, presumed dead in an attack from Khan that also apparently killed his fiancée Reshma, gets a lead on the millionaire financier aiding Khan and travels to Canada to thwart their new efforts.
Because we're watching a Bollywood movie, there's a love story as well as a love triangle, and there are more than a couple of large-scale musical numbers like the one mentioned above. There's also some commentary -- although the villainous Khan is a Muslim and motivated by the extremist jihadi ideology we see in Al Qaeda and others, Arun is also a Muslim but entirely different. He insists on a practice of Islam that emphasizes its charity for the poor and protetction of the weak. Such a message may seem pretty standard to us, but it's not nearly as common in Hindu-dominated India and Indian cinema.
It's the kind of message that probably couldn't come from lesser stars, but Arun is played by the "Action King of Bollywood," Sunny Deol, whose reputation in Hindi cinema carries a lot of weight. He's aided by Preity Zinta as Reshma, the village girl he falls in love with while on assignment (because he's a character in a Bollywood movie, he's a male with a pulse and she's played by the spirited, engaging and irresistible Preity Zinta, that's why), who is herself a highly respected voice in Indian entertainment.
Hero may not be the best translation of a Bondish gadgets-guns-and-gams spy action movie into the Bollywood format. It's about an hour too long, has probably two more musical numbers than it needs and sometimes takes seriously what it should wink at as silly. But it is a load of fun and the impatient may always employ the fast-forward button when necessary.
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