83: Good Movie But a Missed Opportunity

 

I read in news that the movie 83 was not doing good in terms of revenues as audiences were not flocking to the theatres. Hence, I took the risk and booked ticket for next day and watched it in a theater. This was my first movie in a theater since last year’s pandemic. Like most boys born in 1980s, I had grownup being a Kapil Dev fan and for the first time a movie about him was made, so I wanted it to do it well commercially too. And I am a big Ranveer Singh fan, so there were two compelling reasons to take the risk.

Now, about the movie. Having watched its promos and songs, I went into the theater expecting it to be a Kapil Dev ‘biopic’. But it turned out to be a historical drama only about World Cup Cricket 1983. It was difficult to digest this fact which we start noticing after spending some time through the movie. Whenever Ranveer Singh comes on the screen, he leaves in a few minutes and we are left wishing for his more screen-time. It happens again and again and till the movie ends. It feels like director Kabir Khan or the movie makers took sadistic pleasures in disappointing the fans of both Kapil Dev and Ranveer Singh. Ranveer Singh looked totally transformed physically. His physic, body language, speech, everything was totally changed for this movie. He did so much work to transform himself for this movie, but the movie does nothing to match the content with his intent.

The movie tried to give us a wholesome drama around the WC 1983. How our players were poor, struggling, not famous and how they did the “David kills Goliath” by defeating West Indies and winning the World Cup. Fine, but this could have been covered in last 60 minutes of the movie. Now, I can also understand that the movie tried to do justice with each of the 11 players who were in the WC team and this is really commendable. But, we did not go to the theater to know the story of each of those 11 players. We are fine with 50% of screen-time given to others, but remaining 50% should be about Kapil Dev. But it seemed as if the movie makers were really bent on giving a “fair chance” to each team member. And this killed the magic that this movie could have given to us by making the movie a bit more about Kapil Dev than about World Cup. I think other viewers would agree with me on this.

Apart from Ranveer Singh, Pankaj Tripathi as Manager, PR Man Singh, has done a great job. It was in fact Pankaj Tripathi who made us glued all through the movie and not Ranveer Singh. Then I really liked Tahir Raj Bhasin as Sunil Gavaskar; as he has done a really great job. Apart from Ranveer Singh, I felt only Tahir who tried to reflect some of the aura of the great Cricket star he was playing. Fourth place comes to Krishnamachari Srikkanth who has been given tremendous footage in the movie, for creating comic scenes. And Jatin Sarna as Yashpal Sharma was also very good. In fact I liked Yashpal Sharma after watching this movie, while earlier I did not know much about him.

Boman Irani as Farokh Engineer was an unnecessary character. Use of Indira Gandhi’s character and the way it was shown that she used Cricket as a trick for communal peace looked like a “cheap trick”. I wonder how the movie makers wasted screen time on such unnecessary characters. If they had given even 20 more minutes to Kapil Dev’s character, the movie won’t have to struggle at the box office to begin with and I won’t need to risk my life to support commercial cinema.

All said and done, I would categorize 83 as a “near-miss” and will expect some other movie maker to do true justice to Kapil Dev’s character. Use Ranveer Singh again, if possible. I remember earlier once movies about famous personalities like Bhagat Singh used to be made, 3-4 movie makers would compete with each other to make their movie on the same subject. But this time, no one else is seen and Kabir Khan was the sole flag-bearer who did well to disappoint Kapil Dev fans. I shall long to wait for a proper movie to be made on Kapil Dev.