Gully Boy Movie Review: Potentially hard-hitting tale that turns into star vehicle for Ranveer Singh to revel in, well supported by Alia Bhatt.
Despair and drudgery hound Murad Ahmed (Ranveer Singh), the protagonist of Gully Boy, Bollywood’s first true-blue street rapper musical. The Dharavi boy’s enervating frustrations translate into simmering rage, which he then channels into caustic hip hop harangues. Kyun lagta hai yeh bustee ek andha kuan hain (Why do I feel this slum is a dead end), he writes in his worn-out notebook. That line is a rhetorical question. The answer is blowing in the wind.
Murad, caught in a cycle of poverty and bleakness, recognizes – and embraces – rap poetry as a ticket out of the hellhole he calls home. But there’s no poetry in his perfunctory life in a cramped tenement. His snappish father (Vijay Raaz), who has brought home a second wife without so much as a by your leave, is a chauffeur who hopes education will set his son free. But Murad, who attends college lectures when he isn’t on clandestine dates with his fiercely possessive girlfriend Safeena Firdausi (Alia Bhatt) or hanging out and occasionally apathetically flouting the law with his pals Moin (Vijay Verma) and Salman (Nakul Sahdev), has other ideas.
The principal conflict point in Gully Boy, written by Reema Kagti and director Zoya Akhtar, is predicated on the seemingly unbridgeable gap between Murad’s ‘khwaab’ (dream) and the overwhelming ‘aaju baaju ki asliyat’ (the reality around him), which his defeatist father never tires of reminding him of. Late in the film, the titular hero’s maternal uncle (Vijay Maurya, also the film’s dialogue writer) verbalizes the boy’s destiny: “naukar ka beta naukar banega (a servant’s son can only be a servant)”.
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