Ram Gopal Varma Returns To Hindi Cinema With ‘Veerappan’

If Jon Favreau’s Jungle Book is  an interpretation of jungle laws during the British Raj, Ram Gopal Varma’s Veerappan is the real Jungle Raj.

Here is the bonafide undisguised  self-crowned king of the Karnataka jungle who according to the statistics provided in the trailer killed 97 policemen, 184 civilians and 900 elephants.

Ouch.

We are spared  none of Veerappan’s sadism and sheer pleasure that he took in killing , in the trailer.Ram Gopal Varma has never shied away from focusing on the violence that Man secretes in his subsconsciouness . It lurks and hides and waits to finds its way to the outside.And when the violence spills out Ramu is there waiting to capture every detail of the violent outpouring.

You really can’t put him down. After a hiatus of  three years Ram Gopal Varma is back in Hindi cinema with a remake of his Kannada  bio-pic on the jungle outlaw Veerappan. The Hindi version seems less sanguinary than the Kannada original.

The Hindi version brings back Sandeep Bhardwaj who bears an uncanny resemblance to the real Veerappan. Ramu has an uncanny knack of seeking out doppelgangers for real-life criminals. In The Attacks Of 26/11 he had discovered  Sanjeev Jaiswal who was a spitting image of Kasab.

The cast in Veerappan is authentic. I caught Lisa Ray and Sachin Joshi among in the credible cast, looking so much part of the jungle rage I didn’t want to disturb them.

In Veerappan Bhardwaj balances that infamous moustache and the brute force associated with the original Veerappan . It’s a chilling likeness, made even more ominous by the director’s familiarity with the sounds movements protocol  of the jungle. He had earlier visited the thickest and scariest folds of the jungle in Jungle where Sushant Singh(not Rajput) had played a pseudo-Veerappan.

This is the real thing.Stark and unrelenting. Fearless in its portrayal of the most dreaded  outlaw of South India.

The trailer is not for the faint-hearted. But then when has Ramu ever shied away from going the whole hog? Or Elephant? Ripped off tusk, and all.

Ouch again.