Locations in Europe: England
Storyline
Director/Producer: Anirudh Iyer (Director) / Bhushan Kumar, Krishan Kumar Aanand L Rai (Producers)
Star(s): Ayushmann Khurrana
Songs/Dance/Action: One song ‘Aap Jaisa Koi’ shot in London
Indian/ International Crew: Indian and International
Language: Hindi
Line Producer/Executive Producer/ Associate Producer: Kamaal H Khan (executive in charge of UK production), Luke Hetherington (Second second assistant director), Simon Cockren and team (sfx supervisor), Dave Judge (coordinator of stunt team entirely from the UK), Neil Willis (drone aerial cinematographer), Birendra Kumar Lodh, Naiksatam Amol Ramchandra, Ranjeet Singh (location managers), Eszter Hercsik (key make-up artist)
Film Location Analysis
By Kaushik Bhaumik
The U.K. segment begins with the hero's arrival at an airport and then being whisked off by security personnel to meet his attorney. Next, we cut to a drone's-eye view of a seaside town residing on white cliffs. We are told that the picturesque town with squeaky clean air and sunshine is Portsmouth, but shooting for the Portsmouth sequences all happened on the Isle of Wight. The film is the first to extend the shooting of Indian cinema in the UK to the Isle of Wight. What we are looking at is the town of Ventnor on the southeast coast of the Isle. The film was shot for two weeks in the Ventnor area. 300 locals were brought in as extras. We cut to the Ventnor esplanade, where we see the hero drinking and conversing with his attorney on a sunlit terrace. We see the calm sea in the background. The scene was shot on the iconic exterior of the classic Art Deco Winter Gardens restaurant. Cut to a scene with the two clearly sitting on the pavement outside a bistro—the Met Italia bistro on Ventnor esplanade. After a scene in an apartment looking on to a non-descript view of Ventnor town, we see a shootout outside a villa where the villain shoots down policemen. A chase sequence ensues as the hero runs away and the police give him chase in a car. The chase scenes are shot in the adjoining areas of the Grove, Belgrave Road, and Church Street. We see St. Catherine’s Church a number of times during the chase. Belgrave Road, being the higher terrace road above the Esplanade, afforded a few glimpses of the sea in the background as the chase alternated between Belgrave Road and another street in town. We see Victorian houses cascading down the slopes of the hill on which Ventnor is perched. The chase culminates on Church Street, where we have a slight glimpse of the legendary Art Deco Rex Cinema, which was built in 1938 and demolished in 2001 to accommodate an Italian restaurant. The chase culminates on the scaffolding built around the old police station and the health centre by Ventnor authorities to assist in filming the stunts. We again view St. Catherine’s Church across the road while the stunts are going on. A second chase sequence continues the last one. We are on Pier Street with the villain, watching the scenes of the earlier chase that finishes with the hero stealing a red car and driving away. We see the Indian restaurant Masala Bay as the villain accosts an old English lady to part with her car to give chase to the villain. For a moment, we are taken aback when we see a blink-and-you-miss sequence of the chase in an English town near Epping! We then realize that the chase, now with the hero chased by both police and villains, is shot on British motorways to raise the scale of the action. Even in the countryside, muddy roads are on a larger scale than the Isle of Wight motorways. However, the sequences mix scenes from England and the Isle. Suddenly, we are back on the Isle of Wight. The hero drives into Compton Farm in Franklin. He manoeuvres the narrow lanes between the farm sheds while being chased by police cars. He veers wildly between lanes, dodging farming vehicles that are moving within the lanes. At one point, the hero uses one such vehicle to hide in a shed on the blind side of the vehicle, and the police cars pass him by. The hero skids and drives away from the farm at high speed. Lyrical drone shots now show him speeding down the Isle of Wight motorways. Cut to more lyrical drone shots of him speeding down the motorway on the Military Road on the edge of the cliff, thus affording us a James Bond-like flamboyance of a red car driving plein air at high speed on a bright sunny day down a highway with the sunlit sea in the backdrop, denoting a heroic free spirit and freedom from the cares of the world. The sequence has shots of sunlit and rainy days shot on Military Road. The sequence ends with the hero and the villain having a confrontation that ends with him shutting the villain up in the boot of his red car and walking away.
The scene then shifts to a long conversation sequence where the hero meets a potential troubleshooter at the Blacksmith’s Arms in Newport. We see a brief shot of the hero walking up to the pub. Next, we have a long fight sequence inside the villa we saw at the beginning of the Ventnor sequence. The fight between hero and villain happens indoors. A new gang arrives suddenly, and we are thrown into a new chase sequence with the hero driving off in an Audi, chased by a set of villains on two BMW motorbikes. This sequence is shot mainly with drones and steadicams, with shots of the Audi racing through narrow country roads as well as motorways going up and down gentle hill slopes. The sequence is shot in the countryside outside Ventnor and sees the hero stave off the two motorcycles by forcing them to topple over the motorway fencing, one down a hill slope and the other on the inner shoulder, leaving the motorcycles piled up on the motorway. Undoubtedly inspired by chase sequences in the James Bond, Bourne, and MI franchises, the bikes go up in flames when they crash. This chase sequence is efficient, shot well, and edited smoothly across an imaginative use of the Isle of Wight roads and motorways. Since the sequence involves few figures, they cut a smart, windswept, smooth, speedy figure against the open landscape. The sequence has a feel of being speedy while at the same time being calm because of the intimacy and medium-small scale of the landscape in which it is shot. The sequences shot from a low angle on the elevated flatness of the motorway sloping away gently produce an intimacy to the action sequences that is sometimes missing in action sequences shot at a more frenetic pace and larger scale. The sequence is also a paean to the durability of the bullet-proof body of the Audi, as high-speed bullets bounce off the streaking black profile of the car nonchalantly.
The action now moves to London. It begins at night with the Thames boat cruise taking off from the Tower Millennium Pier in the Tower Hill area, close to the Tower Bridge, with the iconic Oxo Tower behind it. A fight sequence between the hero and a bevy of goons happens on the cruise boat, affording a full view of iconic London sites such as the Tower Bridge and the London Eye ferris wheel. All is very pop as the buildings are lit up in neon. The Tower Bridge is prominently framed towards the end of the fight sequence, with us being made to believe through static low angle shots that the boat is moving underneath the bridge while the fight is happening. The fight ends with the London Eye in purple neon framed quite prominently against the hero’s face as he disposes of the last of his assailants. Throughout, comic relief is provided by a cruise guide dressed up as a Beefeater Guard, seen at the Tower and Buckingham Palace in a traditional red uniform and the tell-tale bearskin hat. The hero borrows the costume from him as a disguise, and we now see him enter the Piccadilly-Soho-Leicester Square-Trafalgar Square district. We begin with a low-angle shot of the iconic Eros statue in the Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain in Piccadilly Circus, farmed against an inky blue night sky. Random shots of crowds cut with neon signage for SOHO or shops in the district frame the hero’s jaunt through the area. We see random London sights such as Nelson’s Column at Trafalgar Square, the St Martin-in-the-Fields church in the same area, and the Criterion Theatre/Restaurant (est. 1874) on Piccadilly Circus, where he sees a huge LED display amongst the iconic bank of lit signage that marks Piccadilly Square, showing him endorsing Signature drinking water (a cypher to sell Signature whisky, actually). We see him walk in front of the Odeon at Leicester Square, with the Chinatown Chinese lanterns in the backdrop. He enters the iconic Rupert Lane, down which a bunch of Chinese actors walk past carrying a New Year's Day dragon on their shoulders. The hero is here to meet a Chinese hacker. There is a celebration of the diversity of people that populate the area at night; the sequence begins with a shot from the back of the shaven head of an Afro-Brit young man and ends with a meeting with a Chinese gay young man. Then we suddenly see him in the arcades of the iconic Brixton covered market. Throughout, we have the length of his walk interspersed with televisual footage from India, where news anchors and the public are seen and heard pillorying him for the murder he has allegedly committed.
The hero is picked up from an underground parking area in Brixton by unknown goons and brought to an open terrace overlooking the Thames. The night scene continues. We can see the Waterloo Bridge on the right, with traffic on it, and the Southbank complex next to it. We also see the London Eye and purple neon light again as the conversation wanders from one end of the terrace to another. We have a long sequence between the hero and an international Mafia Don wanted for terrorism, a thinly veiled version of Indian gangster No. 1, Dawood Ibrahim. There is a jokey reference to D-Day, a 2013 Bollywood film based on Ibrahim’s life. Now the film quickly moves to its climax, with the hero being forced to dance by the Don at his relative’s wedding. We see a rather insipid item number cover of the legendary Aap Jaisa Koi song from the 1979 Feroz Khan film Qurbani, filmed on Zeenat Aman, with music given by the Brit avant-pop godfather Biddu. We have a desultory fight sequence in the corridors of a hotel. We can see the Thames through the hotel corridor. It seems the entire sequence—the terrace, item number, and fight—were filmed in the same building overlooking the Thames. The sequence ends with the hero and the villain sitting on a ledge inside the hotel room with the same scene as the backdrop we saw at the beginning on the terrace—Waterloo Bridge and the Southbank complex—but this time across a glass window of a hotel room at a lower plane of sight. The high terrace's open-air view ends in a low-slung indoor view of the same London landmark. The scene shifts to a building in the office district across the Thames that we had seen at the beginning of the film, from where the narration began. Two Indian secret service agents speak to the hero, and a deal is struck. Next, we see one of the agents speaking to his "boss" walking up and down a pavement adjacent to Westminster Abbey, on the Abingdon Street side of things. The hero is now free to leave England, and we see him inside the plane taking him back to India. We cut back to the night scene, where we see the hero shoot down the villain. The villain lies on the ledge by the window, and a top shot shows the traffic pass by on the street way below the window looking out of the hotel room as well as a sliver of the Thames on the other side of the street. The shot tries to give a sense of the dead body of the villain floating away on a barge on the river. A white limousine on the street below also looks like a boat given its extended, streamlined contour. We are back with the hero on the plane, where he asks a hostess what time they will be landing in India. The hostess replies by saying it will be a bright, sunny morning in India. The nightmare is over; the villain seems to have been a figment of a bad dream the hero was having, which was now ebbing away, carrying the villain away on the dreamy, wispy waves of the Thames.
Additional Information and Links
Coverage of the shooting in Isle of Wight local press:
https://www.countypress.co.uk/news/23120486.bollywood-action-movie-action-hero-filmed-isle-wight/
https://www.countypress.co.uk/news/23290412.isle-wight-featured-bollywood-film-action-hero-netflix/
