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Gold took a good advance as it collected over 13 crore nett advance collections before release. This is by far the highest for an Akshay Kumar starrer as it beat the likes o Housefull 3, Rustom and Toilet Ek Prem Katha. It is down to the holiday period as advances for day one are very good. The likes of Rustom and Toilet Ek Prem Katha were also released at a similar time to Gold but the big holiday fell after the weekend for both Rustom and Toilet Ek Prem Katha.
The advance of Gold is the 11th highest ever just falling outside the top ten but the other films around it are more commercial films with action films dominating the pre release collections. Dangal is probably less commercial than the rest but even that had a relatable setting as compared to a Gold which is a period setting and that too in United Kingdom.
It is a very solid advance considering that Gold is more of a content film than a film that jumps out of the tracks but that is where the big holiday on day one has made a big difference. It is also a five day weekend so tickets have sold till for five days compared to the regular three days. The top fifteen advances (in terms of collections) of all time are as follows.
1. Bahubali - The Conclusion - 37,53,00,000
2. Avengers - Infinity War - 28,14,00,000
3. Tiger Zinda Hai - 24,76,00,000
4. Sultan - 21,53,00,000
5. Sanju - 20,35,00,000
6. Race 3 - 19,16,00,000
7. Dangal - 18,84,00,000
8. Prem Ratan Dhan Payo - 15,73,00,000
9. Dhoom 3 - 15,18,00,000
10. Happy New Year - 13,62,00,000
11. Gold - 13,25,00,000 apprx
12. Kick - 12,89,00,000
13. Bajrangi Bhaijaan - 12,65,00,000
14. Tubelight - 12,41,00,000
15. Raees - 12,29,00,000
Akshay Kumar, Vineet Kumar Singh, Kunal Kapoor in Gold (Courtesy: akshaykumar)
Cast: Akshay Kumar, Mouni Roy, Vineet Kumar Singh, Amit Sadh, Kunal Kapoor
Director: Reema Kagti
Rating: 2 Stars (Out of 5)
In the game with a solitary actor with proven star power, Gold, written and directed by Reema Kagti, glitters only intermittently. Hinging overly on the inner and external struggles of a fictitious character essayed by Akshay Kumar, the sports drama does not adequately mine the individual stories of the plucky players who got the better of Great Britain on the latter's home turf to win independent India's first Olympic field hockey gold in 1948.
With the spotlight squarely on Tapan Das, a team manager grappling with his own set of issues in a battle to stay relevant in free India's hockey plans, neither the turmoil of the times nor the dynamics of assembling a winning combination in the face of severe odds are depicted in their entirety or with the requisite force. Gold leaves an entire goldmine untapped.
This film is primarily about avenging "do sau saal ki ghulami (200 years of slavery)", so the principal enemy is England, not Pakistan. This is one aspect of Gold that sets it apart from other Bollywood sports films. When the Indians takes on Great Britain in the London Olympic final, Pakistani players in the stands cheer them on. And before Pakistan plays the Netherlands in the semis, the Indian manager goes to the former team's change room and greets the captain, a former protege.
Akshay Kumar in Gold (Image courtesy: akshaykumar)
But, then, the protagonist is a Bengali and stereotyping is inevitable. Even when that man seems to be speaking grammatically perfect Hindi, he has to have a thick regional accent. He and his wife have to frequently break into Bangla to prove which part of the country they belong to. Which self-respecting Bengali in a Bollywood film can get by without uttering "Urri baba", "gondogol" or "aami jaani" a few times? Tapan Das follows the script. His wife, played by Mouni Roy, adds her bit to the macher jhol syndrome: she pronounces fish as 'feesh'. It stinks.
The lead actor of Gold should have been the film's strength. He instead turns out to be its biggest weakness - he overshadows, or in many cases completely blanks out, the little real-life stories that might have made the film a more complete and complex portrait of a hockey team that made history.
The mercurial Tapan Das all too frequently lapses into facetiousness, especially in his banter with his wife Monobina, who can barely keep him off the bottle and his self-destructive ways. But, of course, he is the hero of the story but none of his transgressions push him off the rails.
The same cannot be said for the film's many gratuitous digressions. In one sequence, a scion of a United Provinces royal family, Raghubir Pratap Singh (Amit Sadh), a talented but super-egoistic centre-forward, stops his speeding car when he spots an unwashed, impoverished man sitting under a tree by the dirt track. The princeling alights from the vehicle, takes off all his clothes and gives them to the beggar.
Akshay Kumar and Mouni Roy in Gold (Image courtesy: imouniroy)
Tapan Das, strapped for cash and coming off several career-threatening setbacks, makes his way to a Buddhist monastery in the woods and seeks access to its grounds for India's Olympic preparations. The hockey-loving head monk first nods his head to indicate refusal and then breaks his five-year-old maun vrat (vow of silence) and acquiesces when he hears the name of his favourite player, Samrat (Kunal Kapoor), the star of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, where India laid Germany low before a home crowd that included a furious Fuhrer.
The manager is always high on cheap whisky but rather low on scruples when it comes to money. He understandably has detractors in the hockey federation, one of whom eggs him on to get drunk at a party thrown to announce free India's first Olympic field hockey team. Sloshed, he breaks into boisterous song and dance and misbehaves with the British ladies at the do. By way of punishment, he is barred from accompanying the team to the 1948 London Olympics. The players take off for the Games without him. That is drama for you.
In a far more effective interlude, the fissures in the team on regional lines are snuffed out by Samrat. He orders the players to repeatedly move a pile of bricks from one end of the field to the other. They keep doing the coach's bidding until they are out of breath. Having done a lot of huffing and puffing, the boys realise that there is a less exacting way available to them: teamwork.
Gold is littered with such off-the-field sequences that stem from flights of fancy that have no basis in fact. Of course, the film does not claim to be an accurate reenactment of independent India's 1948 Olympic hockey campaign only a year after earning freedom from British rule and grappling with the depletion of its ranks in the wake of the horrific Partition riots. It projects itself as a work of pure fiction. And that is a pity.
It is difficult to say how much brighter Gold would have been had it deigned to tell the true story of Balbir Singh Sr, a Partition survivor who scored two of India's four goals in the final of the London Olympics or of the character who goes by the name of Imtiaz Ali Shah (Vineet Kumar Singh) - named the captain of the Indian team, he opts to migrate to Pakistan fearing for his life, like many of the real Muslim hockey stars of the day. It is, however, certain that it would have been a more gripping and convincing sage.
Gold opens with the Berlin Olympics hockey final, at the end of which the Indian team receives the gold medal as the Union Jack flutters. Tapan Das half-flashes an Indian tricolour with the charkha in the middle and ehorts the players to salute the flag. The film ends with the London Olympics, by which time India isn't British India anymore. Both these passages are pretty well handled. The action on the field lend excitement to the proceedings while the crowd scenes add colour to the frames.
But what unfolds in the long, overly dramatized interregnum is patchy both in overall tonality and in terms of specific plot points. As with much else, liberties are taken with the India-England final. In reality, India won 4-0. In the fictional reimagining, India is down 3-1 before 'trump card' Himmat Singh (Sunny Kaushal, who is the film's brightest spot) - his being held back leads to conflict within the team, a pub brawl to be precise - comes in as a late replacement and inspires a glorious fightback.
Akshay Kumar inevitably hogs the footage, but it is Sunny Kaushal, Amit Sadh and Vineet Kumar Singh who do all the fancy dribbling on the acting front. Unfortunately, they just aren't allowed enough of the action.
Hockey, at its best, is an incredibly fast-paced game and any film about the sport has got to capture that inherent momentum for it to work. Gold fails to do that, dragged down by a storyline that puts too much store by the anticipated crowd-pulling power of a Bollywood A-lister. The script, and the real events that inspired it, take a backseat in the process. As a result, what could have been a blinder of a movie barely manages to hobble its way to a climax that holds no surprises because it is a part of Indian sporting folklore.
There's a line repeated four times over the course of Reema Kagti's new film which posits that India winning gold in hockey at the 1948 London Olympics would mean "do sau saal ki ghulami ka badla (200 years of slavery avenged).
The first person to say it is Tapan Das (Akshay Kumar), a sports official consumed with the idea of India winning at the Olympics as an independent nation (three previous hockey golds had gone to British India). The third is Tapan's wife, who tells the Buddhist monks helping her cook for the team: "Don't think that you're just preparing food you're taking revenge for 200 years of slavery.
Even in these divided times, perhaps we can all agree that the cooking of patta gobhi isn't any kind of blow against the empire. It's been a patriotic few years for Hindi cinema (and India in general), and Gold isn't the first film to go overboard professing its nation-love. Gold begins with the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
As the Indian players leave the stadium after a game, two young men break from the crowd and try to raise the Swaraj flag. In the ensuing confusion, Tapan, who's on the team staff, grabs the flag and stuffs it under his coat. The flag makes a cameo when India, captained by the brilliant Samrat (Kunal Kapoor) a stand-in for Dhyan Chand wins the final. But you'd best believe its big dramatic moment comes later in the film.
It's 1946, and Tapan is a down-on-his-luck alcoholic reduced to influencing punters at wrestling matches. The news that India is planning to send a hockey team to the London Games the 1940 and 44 Olympics were cancelled because of the war gives him some purpose in life, and he talks the higher- ups into allowing him to scout for players.
After Samrat tells him that his playing days are over, Tapan brings in another player from 1936, Imtiaz (Vineet Kumar Singh), as captain. Younger players are recruited as well, including Raghubir Pratap Singh (Amit Sadh), of the Balrampur royal family, and Sikh village boy Himmat Singh (Sunny Kaushal), set on a collision course by an early musical number which cross-cuts between their respective childhoods.
Gold is a change of scale for Reema Kagti, who directed the ensemble drama Honeymoon Travels Pvt. Ltd and the noir thriller Talaash. Kagti, who also wrote this film, can certainly whip up a set-piece the party song "Monobina has a lusty energy reminiscent of "Gallan Goodiyaan from Dil Dhadakne Do, which she co-wrote.
The lighting and framing (cinematography by lvaro Gutirrez) is fetching, as it was in Talaash. Some of the period detail is wonderful; for instance, when Tapan is still a wrestling tout, one of the fighters is Stanislaus Zbyszko, a legendary grappler who acted in the 1950 film Night and the City.
But Gold can only hint at the religious and class divides in the Indian team at the time, though they must have been an issue so soon after Partition. And the film is robbed of both pace and intelligence by its tendency to over-explain.
Film-maker Ernst Lubitsch once said that the audience need only be given two and two; they'll come up with four themselves and appreciate you for it. Kagti gives the viewer two, two, four, and a calculator.You see this in the scene where Samrat (who's been brought in to coach the new team) tells Tapan and Raghubir about his favourite moment as a player the time he drew a bunch of opposition players, who were all man-marking him, into a corner of the field and then passed to a free teammate, resulting in the game's only goal.
Now, we've already been shown several times that Raghubir won't pass the ball to his teammates, so the import of this scene is perfectly clear. But Tapan hammers on, telling Raghubir that the most important player isn't the goal-scorer but the one whose actions result in the goal being scored. The story itself is a nice idea, but that extra beat, that crucial unwillingness to trust the viewer, reveals the film's insecurities.
For a 150-minute sports film, Gold spends surprisingly little time on the field. And when we do get to see hockey being played, it's perfunctory all quick cutting and close-ups. We're offered little by way of tactics or individual skills; the only specific thing we know about any of these players is that Raghubir doesn't like to pass. As a result, the different matches have no distinct personality, unlike, say, the ones in Chak De! India, or the bouts in Dangal.
There's a lone moment of inspiration, borrowed from a famous Indian victory in another sport, but for the most part this film is less concerned about hockey than the politics that accompanied it.
Even as the quality of the writing ranges up and down, the cast is consistent and winning. Vineet Singh brings a weary dignity to his role as the Indian, then Pakistani, captain; Kunal Kapoor is relaxed and charismatic; and Sunny Kaushal is riveting as the young hothead who's a softie when he's with his girlfriend.
Akshay Kumar is almost vanquished by a thick Bengali accent and half-a-dozen drunken scenes; his lead turn is respectable as most of his performances have been in the last couple of years but I wish Kagti and Kumar had done more to lay bare the psychology of Tapan, an incurable optimist and a bit of a clown, who's thrown into a downward spiral whenever he's kept from serving his country.fifthMAds
Yes, the national anthem is played in the film, and yes, everyone in the audience save for a few ungrateful critics stood up. I wouldn't want to deny anyone their performative patriotism, but I'm not sure what it says about where we are as a nation that a theatre-full of thinking adults watched the final scenes of a film on their feet like it's a perfectly natural thing to do.
https://x.com/filmibeat/status/1968397140549345682
https://x.com/varindersingh24/status/1955662282345808161 https://x.com/aavishhkar/status/1967618349535518917
https://x.com/taran_adarsh/status/1968593840941813931
Movie has released worldwide 12th September and will release in India too...
https://x.com/filmibeat/status/1966156768393966036
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