Dasavatharam (2008)

I rarely write about movies I dislike, but the craziness of this failure just made me want to share my thoughts with you all. It hurts a little bit because star Kamal Hassan seems to be a nice atheist with left-wing opinions, just like me, but still he probably has the ego of someone who believes he's a god! What's even stranger is the presence of a very nice and almost heroic George W. Bush (as a character) even though Kamal Hassan was arrested because of his Arabic name in the united states 2002, a consequence of the racist and fascist politics of Bush after the 9/11 attack! Anyway, why Dasavatharam came to my knowledge was that it's considered a disaster movie, and obsessed by disaster movies from all over the world. This is the third Indian I've seen and by far the worst!

The story, if you can call it a story, is a mess like I never seen before. There's tons and tons of characters who appears and disappears without much logic behind their action, Hassan himself plays ten characters - each one with less and less convincing make-up, ranging from quite okay to just absurdly bad. One problem connected to bad make-up is that one of the leading characters has one of the worst, and it's Hassan who plays something that looks like a parody of Arnold/every eighties cliché you can think of:

And maybe you think that looks good? Well, just watch the movie and you will totally agree with me. It would be more convincing watching a Tupperware bucket running around shooting with a water gun. It doesn't help that Kamal Hassan maybe isn't so fit... well, he's probably strong, but the chubby belly kinda takes away the illusion of him playing a super-strong athletic muscle-bull.

I can sense something ambitious deep inside the storyline, something about chaos theory, something about that everything hangs together just by science and humanity (there's nothing supernatural in this film and Hassan treats religion without respect - which is good of course). All the characters played by him has some kind of connection and without everyone's help (mostly without them knowing it) the world maybe had come to an end. He even turns the 2004 Tsunami to something good - indirectly - because the force of nature helps out with something that could have caused an even bigger, worldwide, disaster.

And here we have the disaster, the 2004 Tsunami - something that affected many Asian countries and also made several of them produce their own disaster movies based on a lot of water - even China and Japan jumped on the bandwagon to use the fear of water to earn a quick buck at the box office. Here the disaster is cheap but still quite effective. It's a mix of real water and digital (and real) water added to already existing locations. Sometimes it looks good, most of the times it looks crap - including the non-CG effects. But it's still  massive, big

disaster scene, which is appreciated.

But in the end Dasavatharam is just an excuse for a lot of action, a lot of it - and most of it is extremely badly choreographed and shot, taking away the power of some nice stunt that could have been a lot cooler if they were shown in their normal speed and without a lot of unnecessary editing. What's even more fun is the overly graphic kills - for being an Indian film - which includes some really juicy squibs (my favourite is a guy that gets shot in the throat and an Fulci-esque amount of blood pumps from the hole!), a gory impaling and a guy actually almost exploding from being affected by the highly dangerous virus! That's fun!

But no, Dasavatharam is just not a good movie and with a lenght of three hours it's just doesn't have "it" for me. I've seen longer movies from India that have a fantastic quality, but here... well, I'm pretty sure they had no idea what the hell they were doing!