CHAK DE INDIA

Chak de India, directed by Shimit Amin is a very well packaged film keeping in mind the taste of the Indian audience.

Its like serving Indian chinese to them which gets lapped by people of all ages and genres in India.

And the taste works..

Chakde is certainly not the best sports film one would have seen, compared to the internationa standards of sports films. Its an average film, but, a very well acclaimed effort which needs to be applauded. Its an effort out of the realm of the regular masala films which our industry has been serving for long. And it cannot and should not go unnoticed and unappreciated.

The POV of the film keeps changing from characters to characters. The film begins with Kabir Khan the captain of the Indian men's hockey team . Having lost the match against Pakistan he is declared a traitor, only to come back 7 years later, to enroll himself as the coach of the sinking women's hockey team. The screenplay doesn't explain what he had been doing all this while [for 7 years]- except when Kabir says- preparing for this meeting!! Well, need less to add he wants to win back the honour of the people which he had lost for no fault of his.

As the story progresses the POV of the story changes to individual characters some interesting- like Jat girl Kamal chutala, the captian Preeti Sabharwal, Vidya Sharma and Bindiya Naik. The screenplay is sprinkled with their individual cataclysms to broader conflicts of them as a team. And Kabir Khan has to overcome those conflicts, for them, as a coach and that too a shunned one.

The writer has done a commendable job to insinuate an effort to come out with a story that needed to be told. I just wished that it didn't get dreary, predictable and at times cliche.

Also, the film on the whole varies from being dramatic to melodramatic hammering the background music when they wanted to make a point. I wonder does our audience still needs to be shouted and screamed at? Its got ham scenes where Kabir Khan is leaving his house after being thrown from the hockey team ,where the mother is weeping leaving her purkhon ka house and as one woman in the crowd rushes to give them a dabba of rotees, her husband says do you also want to be thrown out? very filmi and melodramatic, but am sure the makers had a reason to add that.

And their reason works.. their cliches work...

And not to forget the film is a hit...

So go for it.. Watch Chakde and make your own judgements!!!