Raees Vs Kaabil: Battle Of The Blockbusters Begins!

Here’s why this week’s two releases the eagerly awaited Kaabil and Raees will both do exceedingly well at the boxoffice.

They are both eminently watchable films, that’s why!As simple as that.

Give the audience an engaging yarn. Give them TWO engaging yarns.And they will rush for both. And this time the level of engagingnesss in both the films is high,very high.Both are love stories.Intense love stories. In Kaabil Hrithik Roshan loves his wife to death, whose death you will know soon enough,and is ready to go to any lengths to avenge the wrong done to her. The last 20 minutes of Kaabil are so heart-in-the-mouth you would be advised to hold your bursting bladders until the last drop of blood is shed and avenged on screen.

Kaabil is by far Sanjay Gupta’s best work,  more emotional and dramatic than any of the violent sagas he has narrated in the past. Hrithik gives his finest most searing and passionate performance since Kaho Na…Pyar Hai and Guzaarish.His intensity of emotional expression is disturbing, haunting.

Raees is also a  love story. And it’s got nothing to do with Mahira Khan. Shah Rukh Khan’s character a man of ill-gotten power and wealth from Gujarat in the 1980s, is in love.With himself.Since I believe Shah Rukh in real life truly loves himself, the merger of the actor and the character is so brutally complete, it’s like watching mirror images of two identical souls –one off camera the other on  it–dressed in very different clothes.

Raees is also about how two heterosexual men can be bonded spiritually  even while being on separate sides of the firingline.This is perhaps the first time in his entire career as a leading man that Shah Rukh Khan has found a co-star who is compelling in his own right.Nawazuddin Siddiqui when pitched against Shah Rukh Khan truly defines what ‘The Clash Of The Titans’ means. He does with Shah Rukh what a Rishi Kapoor or VinodKhanna could never do with Amitabh Bachchan.

Tit for tat.

The two actors keep us ruthlessly riveted to the screen. The movement of the plot is almost maniacal, to match the manic energy and mutinous passion  of the two men at each  other’s throats.

More than anything else, the two films this week prove what Hindi cinema has known all along. Nothing can replace the cult of superstardom . The mysticism magic and magnetism that Khan and Roshan bring to the screen have to be seen to be  believed.

Don’t pick one between Raees and Kaabil. Go see both.