Jigar (1992)

To take care of Ninja Dixon also means I need to suffer through a lot of movies that many of you never gonna way anyway. Jigar is one of them. Not that it's especially terrible, not more than usual, but an almost three hour long Bollywood remake of Kickboxer takes its toll. It took me three days to finish it, but that does not mean it's bad... just very lengthy.

Ajay Devgan is Raju, a young man who's brother is a famous martial arts fighter. When he's crippled after a very unfair match Raju swears he'll take revenge. When his sister also is sexually abused by the same people, and takes suicide, he goes over the edge and is almost killed himself. When he wakes up he focuses more on the training, and becomes a pupil of a famous "karate instructor", who teaches him a lot of Kung Fu-related moves and to fight without being able to see. Yeah, something like that.

Yeah, I'll confess. It's hard to keep up the concentration when the movie almost clocks in on three hours and most of it just is people dancing and singing. I have nothing against either of these details, the basis of a Bollywood-movie, but here it often disturbs the story, the suspense and it makes you just sit and wish for non-stop Thai action instead. Most of the storyline is borrowed from Kickboxer, but I can swear I've seen some scenes in Hong Kong movies - for example the training scene with Raju and the "karate instructor". He learns who to catch eggs without breaking them and shit like that.

It also took me until I started writing this review that Ajay Devgan is the same guy playing Singham. They sure had a similar face, but when the Singham-Devgan is muscular killer-machine, Jigar-Devgan mostly looks like a wimp who needs a haircut. But he can fight, nothing wrong with that ability. The action scenes, quite few, a are well-made and violent - and quite bloody. It's a lot of slow-motion and round-kicks, exaggerated sound effects and melodrama that lasts long after the movie has ended. When the action sets in, this is a very entertaining and cool movie. It also boasts a couple of nice motocross stunts, always a welcome sight in any kind of movie.

It's just a pity the boring songs and uninspired dance numbers destroys the feeling of a solid movie. They effectively stops the flow and it has a hard time starting over after each time a song- and dance-number finishes. Except the action, the movie is saved by brilliant and over-the-top bad guys with big moustaches. The evil Evil EVIL martial arts-baddie also looks like Gene Simmons in a mullet, which makes every scene with him even better.

Jigar is an unimportant film, but a must for us avid collectors of odd fighting movies from all over the world.