Jailer - Bhola Shankar - Why are our heroes angrier in films?

SOUTH FILMS THAT ARE NOW PAN-INDIA ARE TURNING TO VIOLENCE AND STUNTS THAT HAVE TAKEN A TURN FOR BLOODBATHS AND VICIOUS, GUT-WRENCHING SCENES. WHAT IS THE REASON FOR INCREASING VIOLENCE IN FILMS?

- RAJESHWARI KALYANAM

Raj & DK's Guns & Gulaabs on Netflix is a gangster series that has recreated the 80s in the best of its hues including stunts, chase scenes, and gun fights that score on craft over gore.

Raj & DK's Guns & Gulaabs on Netflix is a gangster series that has recreated the 80s in the best of its hues. The Sholay kind of Bollywood titles, all those typically 80s material including the cassettes with their obnoxious jhankar beats, the campa colas, geometry boxes, love stories minus the mobile phones, the black and white TV sets with their door, a lot of dialogue baazi... and most importantly the stunts that include a whole lot of chase scenes and gun fights of the vintage kind. Yes, there are these shots where you would have a bullet smashing through the skull spilling the blood before the screen goes into graphic mode, and the knife-wielding assassin Atmaram adds to the blood spilling - yet it was refreshing to watch the action drama that reeked of vintage in every frame, in a good way.

Gun & Gulaabs was not just rich in terms of scripting, editing, and other technical departments - it also was taking back stunts to their good old days of craft over gore.

The series is poetic justice in the melee of larger-than-life actions films, especially the south films that are now PAN India films, where violence and stunts have taken a turn for bloodbath and vicious, gut-wrenching scenes, quite literally.

Perhaps for Raj & DK it was also the tight script and their command over screenplay, charecterisation, and recreating a period and space so beautifully adding to the charm has also worked in their favour, and perhaps it doesn't always work for every film or web series. Perhaps action films need something beyond action, and horror films are not horrifying unless a certain shock factor is part of the screenplay.