'The Attacks of 26/11' Movie Review Latest News film updates Photos/Pics Ram Gopal Varma Ratings

'The Attacks of 26/11' Movie Review.'The Attacks of 26/11' Latest News.'The Attacks of 26/11' film updates.'The Attacks of 26/11' Photos. 'The Attacks of 26/11' Pics.'The Attacks of 26/11' Ram Gopal Varma.'The Attacks of 26/11' Ratings.'The Attacks of 26/11' Movie Updates.'The Attacks of 26/11' Movie Review in detail.

'The Attacks of 26/11' Tweet Review: First day, first show

Direction: Ram Gopal Varma

Actors: Nana Patekar, Sanjeev Jaiswal, Atul Kulkarni

Rating: 3.5/5

The good news is that The Attacks of 26/11 is one of the better films Ram Gopal Varma has made in recent years. The bad news is that Varma's last few films were duds like Department and Bhoot Returns so the bar is set very low.

In The Attacks of 26/11, Varma recreates Mumbai's tryst with terror on November 26, 2008 when ten men came over in a boat and laid siege to the city. More than 160 people died and over 300 were injured. It was one of the worst terrorist attacks on Indian soil.

Nana Patekar playing joint commissioner of police Rakesh Maria, narrates the events to an inquiry commission. He recounts the 60 hours of horror as young, brain-washed men walked casually around South Mumbai indiscriminately pumping bullets in to men women and children in the Taj hotel lobby, the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, Leopold Cafe and other locations. The Mumbai police struggled valiantly. Eventually the NSG Commandos have to be called in.

This film tells us little that we don't already know. Like Kathryn Bigelow in Zero Dark Thirty, Varma is trying to give us boots-on-the-ground experience.

'The Attacks of 26/11'

But unlike Bigelow, he is unable to create a visceral feel or provide new insights. The action is broken by the commissioner's deposition to the inquiry commission, where half a dozen men sit impassively. Varma relies too much on bullets in slow motion and gore so we see a man's neck being sliced, another's brain exploding with a bullet and blood spread so thickly that people slip in it.

All of which is based in truth but the fact is that most of us have already been through this harrowing experience via live television coverage and at some point, you have to ask; what do I get in return for putting myself through this again? And the answer is not much.

In a few places, The Attacks of 26/11 is startling. The tragic absurdity of constables fighting heavily armed terrorists with stones and lathis hits you.

Nana Patekar, speaking with unduly affected pauses, has a few moments of power and eloquence, especially toward the end when he explains the real meaning of Islam.

But mostly, the film is plodding. Varma insists on bludgeoning background music and the terrorists remain faceless caricatures.

Even Ajmal Kasab, who is the only one fleshed out to some extent, is sketchy and simplistic.

The Attacks of 26/11 is a powerful subject watered down by ineffective story-telling. This could have and should have been so much more.

Star cast: Atul Kulkarni, Nana Patekar, Sanjeev Jaiswal, Ganesh Yadav

What’s Good: The cinematography, the lucid flow of the narration, all performances.

What’s Bad: The style of narration suits the news-mode more than the movie-mode.

Loo break: None.

Watch or Not?: For reliving the intensity of the attacks and this well retold narration, boasting of power packed performances by all, especially Nana Patekar, this one is definitely worth a watch.

It is not a story being told. Not an accident either. The Attacks Of 26/11 is the set of terror attacks that hit Mumbai on November 26, 2008 being produced into reel with some really appreciable cinematography and mentionable performances.

Some native fishermen trek in to the Arabian looking for a rare fish that is found only in deep water. After a while they realize they might have entered international waters, in this case, that of Pakistan. In the mean time they see a Pakistani trawler in distress. While the Indian fishermen try to find out what is wrong, they’re faced with the terrorists coercing them into helping the 10 terrorists to reach Mumbai. All fishermen are killed and dumped at sea by the time they reach a shabby Mumbai port.

'The Attacks of 26/11' Movie Pics

Here on begins the communication between the terrorists and the commoners. The 10 break into smaller groups and attack pre designed areas. The back grounds of the terrorists are not focused upon much as are the little details of the victims. There is often shown some moments of sanity and human considerations on the part of Ajmal Kasab, played by Sanjeev Jaiswal, which were suppressed without delay by his companion in the ruthless strikes.

The climax shows Kasab’s sentence to be hanged till death in action. Crude scenes of violence make the movie unsuitable for the feeble hearted. By the end of the movie the Joint Commissioner of Police, played by Nana Patekar, Mumbai, passes with distinction in the departmental scrutiny and goes to head the Anti Terrorism Squad.

The whole movie sees the Police in a very glorious light. And the attacks are being narrated by Nana Patekar, giving a concrete feel to the content. For the viewer, it is reliving the shame of religious

Nana Patekar (The Attacks of 26/11 Movie Stills)

The Attacks of 26/11 Review: Script Analysis

It is not much of a script. If you have been watching the news during and post- 26/11 attacks, you probably know it all. Even the case updates with regards to Ajmal Kasab will provide you much of the information that Nana Patekar goes on the reveal. So may be for a movie based on a highly spoken-about terrorist attack, The Attacks Of 26/11 fails to break any ice with the script. But keeping that in mind, the movie has a fresh feel that makes you want to sit through and view the very well sequenced script. Sunil Wadhwani does commendable work at editing.

The Attacks of 26/11 Review: Star Performances

We miss Atul Kulkarni, though it makes sense to say his performance was critically well placed. Nana Patekar, if we can ignore, at times, unwanted voice modulation, does an amazing job of playing the Joint Commissioner of Police to a city that did not even have time to recover from an attack before having to face another one of similar or higher magnitudes.  About Sanjeev  Jaiswal, his expressions are commendable though his lines only match them up pretty late into the film.

The Attacks of 26/11 Review: Direction, Music & Technical Aspects

'The Attacks of 26/11' Ram Gopal Varma

Director Ram Gopal Verma went to the scenes in November 2008 to do some 1st hand research. Well, we can see the effect. The film is well directed keeping in mind it put together a massive number of abstract characters. Cinematography however wins over anything else.  Harshraj Shroff and M. Ravichandran Thevar liven up the shades of the sky and the cityscape to explain the pathos in vivid visuals. Vikram Biswas worked pretty well keeping in mind the sound score of the movie set the theme of a psychological thriller (from the terrorists’ point of view ), in combination with that of an incidental narration.

The Attacks of 26/11 Review: The Last Word

We have seen it too many times, the quotes from the Holy religious texts being explained to the wrongdoer after the deed is done. We see it here again. That said, in the aftermath of the recent Hyderabad blasts; see this just to know the larger picture.

Complete Review:

When Ram Gopal Varma went to visit the site of one of the deadliest terrorist attacks in the history of Indian subcontinent, it was seen as a publicity gimmick from a filmmaker who was going through a rough patch, but Varma was serious about his recce.

The maverick director, who is known for films such as 'Satya', 'Company' and 'Sarkar', hasn't given good stories since many months, so he is under pressure to come up with a well crafted film in the form of 'The Attacks of 26/11', which is the dramatic reconstruction of the Mumbai terror attacks of 2008.

The film features Nana Patekar as the Joint Commissioner of Police while Atul Kulkarni will also be seen as an important character, however all eyes would be on Sanjeev Jaiswal who is playing the character of Ajmal Kasab. The recent death sentence of Kasab has increased the curiosity among the audiences.

Good or bad, RGV is known for his bold and unconventional approach towards filmmaking, so he is expected to throw a new light on the events of 26/11.

10:15 AM: #Attacksof2611 is directed by Ram Gopal Varma and is based on 2008 terror attacks of Mumbai.

10: 18 AM: #Attacksof2611 stars Nana Patekar, Atul Kulkarni and Sanjeev Jaiswal, who is playing Ajmal Kasab.

10: 25 AM: The recent hanging of Ajmal Kasab has increased the spectators' interest in #Attacksof2611.

10: 37 AM: RGV is expected to through a new light on the events of Mumbai terror attacks through #Attacksof2611. What do you think?

10: 50 AM: RGV has tried to give a glimpse of the world of terrorists in some of his earlier films but #Attacksof2611 directly deals with terrorism.

10: 54 AM: Is the film going to feature the docudrama style of filmmaking or will it be completely fictionalised? #Attacksof2611

11:00 AM: RGV's trademark camera angles are at play again. Let's hope for good performances. #Attacksof2611

11:07 AM: You can love or hate him but you can't ignore RGV. Unusual camera work would make this sure. #Attacksof2611

11:15 AM: The opening sequence brings a whole new world to the spotlight. The attacks were planned long ago. #Attacksof2621

11: 25 AM: Sanjeev Jaiswal looks just perfect in the role of Kasab. Metaphors are also working well. #Attacksof2611

11:28 AM: #Attacksof2611 is not for weak hearts. It needs courage to digest such a brutal depiction of terrorism.

11:33 AM: Religious and social paradoxes are portrayed well by RGV in #Attacksof2611. The film is very realistic.

11:35 AM: #Attacksof2611 is turning into a gripping tale. Nana Patekar is doing a fantastic job.

11:38 AM: The narration technique used in #Attacksof2611 is very effective. It generates strong and immediate emotions against terrorism.

11:40 AM: RGV is indeed a brave filmmaker. He has not kept anything in heart, everything is on the screen. #Atracksof2611

11:45 AM: Parallel narratives show the mammoth scale of the attacks in different spaces. #Attacksof2611

11:47 AM: RGV is not objective about violence this time. He has taken a stand in these visuals. #Attacksof2611

11:50 AM: #Attacksof2611 is high on emotions. The terror inside the human mind has been personified in Sanjeev Jaiswal.

11:52 AM: Everything from the strategy to the driving ideology has been focussed in #Attacksof2611 so far.

11: 55 AM: One may miss the proper foregrounding of #Attacksof2611 but the documentation of the events has been done well.

11: 57 AM: RGV is likely to face the similar questions about the depiction of brutality as Kathryn Bigelow, but #Attacksof2611 justifies his approach.

12:00 PM: So here it is. We were waiting for this only. The loud chanting in the background. #Attacksof2611

12:02 PM: Was it the lack of training on part of the police which made it easier for the terrorists? #Attacksof2611

12:05 PM: Clinical precision with which the #Attacksof2611 were done shows the amount of training that has been given to these terrorists.

12:07 PM: Such calm and composed terrorists can't be prepared without the help of resourceful external agencies. #Attacksof2611

12:10 PM: #Attacksof2611 are the blots on the prestige of intelligence agencies. It will remain one of their biggest failures.

12:15 PM: Had we reduced the reaction time, we could have saved a lot of lives. #Attacksof2611

12:17 PM: Kasab to police: Jahannum ki aag se bachna hai toh jihad karna hai. #Attacksof2611

12:20 PM: #Attacksof2611 has become a little dramatic. Kasab goes the Shakti Kapoor way.

12:22 PM: RGV has carefully avoided the parts where he needed to show the NSG operations. #Attacksof 2611

12:25 PM: The last thing the audience would like to see is an abrupt ending after such a good build up. #Attacksof2611

12:30 PM: Avoid controversy and be with the popular notion is RGV's mantra in #Attacksof2611.

12:35 PM: Nana Patekar has used a different mannerism in #Attacksof2611. It is given to Nana to make him emerge as the hero of the story.

12: 40 PM: The film reaches its last stage. The characters take dramatic pauses. #Attacksof2611

12:42 PM: #Attacksof2611 ends as per the expectations. A typical RGV finish.

12:47 PM: The first half of #Attacksof2611 is more engaging than the second half. RGV feels the social pressure in the second half.

12:50 PM: #Attacksof2611 is a good film because it shows the futility of jihad in a convincing way. It's disturbing though.

12:52 PM: The structure of #Attacksof2611 is something to watch out. It is linear but displays a wide range of emotions.

12:53 PM: Nana Patekar is forced to act like a Hindi film hero in the end but the actor makes it look natural. #Attacksof2611

12:54 PM: Sanjeev Jaiswal is average but his face will be recognised even after #Attacksof2611.

12:56 PM: Surprisingly, the camera doesn't act voyeuristic in #Attacksof2611. RGV doesn't go for ambitious shots either.

12:57 PM: #Attacksof2611 is a good watch this weekend. You will get to see the old RGV in many scenes.

1:00 PM: Thanks for being with us throughout the tweet review of #Attacksof2611. Stay tuned for more.

The Attacks of 26/11 is bloody but asks no tough questions

At around 8.30pm on Wednesday, 26th November 2008, fishermen at Mumbai’s Machhimaar Colony saw ten young men with large rucksack disembark from an inflatable Zodiac speedboat. An hour later, armed with hand grenades and automatic rifles, they had created terror across the city and grabbed the attention of the whole world. By midnight, over a hundred people, including three of Mumbai’s top cops, lay dead. It would be three days before the attacks of 26/11, as they came to be called, were brought to an end.

Filmmaker Ram Gopal Varma, who infamously managed to gain access to the Taj Hotelthe most well-known site of the Mumbai attacks a mere three days after, has now directed a film that recreates the events of that first fateful night. Varma’s terror-tourism may have been in shockingly bad taste, but as he has repeatedly said, his visit has had no role to play in the making of the film, which contains absolutely no actual footage and relies instead on the dramatic recreation of events.

A still from the film The Attack Of 26/11.

Varma’s last outing, Department(2012), was shockingly adulatory in its approach to its policemen protagonists: two encounter cops thoroughly corrupted by bloodlust and power. Graphic violence, of course, has long been the director’s forte, with its gratuitousness having peaked in recent years: whether he’s making a political drama likeRakthacharitra (2010) or a sex-crime thriller like Not a Love Story (2011). It should be no surprise, then, that The Attacks of 26/11 is both gratuitously violent and completely uncritical in its depiction of the police.

'The Attacks of 26/11' Movie updates 

In fact, Varma leaves absolutely no doubt as to where his affiliations lie: he tells the story not through the eyes of any of the hundreds of victims or survivors, but through those of the Joint Commissioner of Police (the real-life Rakesh Maria, here given a fictitous name and played by the dependably theatrical Nana Patekar). No matter that Maria was not actually witness to any of the events he is “describing” to an enraptured investigatory committee which, conveniently, never asks a single question, allowing Patekar to hold forth in a series of magisterial monologues, interrupted only when Varma shifts to showing us people dying, at Leopold Café, Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus and the Taj Hotel. The Leopold segment offers up the bizarre frisson of reenactment, because Varma has managed to get the café’s actual owner Farhad Jehani to play himself during the shootout. This yields one memorable cinematic moment, when the havaldars outside pitch pebbles into the café to check if the terrorists are still there. But at the other sites all we get is the sight of merciless killing, with Varma either focusing on wounded bodies and crying babies or zooming in to the faces of the killers to show how much pleasure they seem to be taking in the act.

The unstintingly gory recreation of these tragic deaths seems especially a pity because Varma was once gifted enough as a filmmaker to be able to grip us without it. Even this film manages a few moments of soundless menace. The opening sequence, for instance, with the fishing boat Kuber tricked into stopping by another boat’s request for help, achieves a sinister sense of foreboding merely by showing the two boats scraping against each other, lashed by the waves. By the time the Kuber crew is tied up and its genial-looking lungi-clad captain forced, at gunpoint, to take the ten young gunmen on board his boat, we are already cringing inwardly at the knowledge of what is to come. But Varma doesn’t  just show us the sight of the four dead fishermen, trussed up and lying in a row he gives us a verbal exchange between the terrorists that is entirely of his own making: “Humne apne bakre kha liye hain, tum bhi kha lo (we have eaten up our goats, you eat yours too)”

Varma has made much of the fact that he does not intend his film to be read as an indictment of Muslims as a community, but this sort of ‘cinematic liberty’plying the audience with references to halaal and a (beeped out) Allah-u-Akbar as they do the deed is dangerously construable as exactly that. Varma’s rather strange way of balancing this out is to incorporate a long homily on the real message of the Koran. This might have been easier to take if it weren’t put into the mouth of our supposed hero, Patekar-Maria, and delivered to the film’s villain, Ajmal Kasab (debutante Sanjeev Jaiswal), as he cowers amid the corpses of his fellow gunmen on the filthy floor of a morgue.

It is not anyone’s case that Ajmal Kasab and his fellows be depicted as anything but the murderers of innocents. But it is not at all clear what we gain from having him depicted as some kind of caged animal, tearing off pieces of food with handcuffed hands, looking crazed and walking with the shuffling gait of some ape-man. Or indeed, what we gain from watching a trite, bloody rehearsal of the events of that terrible night that neither takes us into the lives of any of the ordinary people affected (beyond the desperate moment of their deaths), nor asks any of the difficult questions that need asking about the role played by politicians, the police and the media. 

The police here are uncritically feted as heroes, while the media and politicians do not even make an appearance.

In 2009, a 48 minute documentary titled Terror in Mumbai Dispatches, co-produced by Channel 4 and HBO, and directed by Dan Reed, was released. Consisting of interviews with victims, actual CCTV videos of the terrorists at various sites, video testimony of the captured Ajmal Kasab soon after he was caught and most terrifying of all, actual audio intercepts between the terrorists and their handlers in Pakistan, Dan Reed’s thoroughly disturbing film has never been shown (or excerpted or discussed) on Indian television. Which is no surprise, perhaps, because it contains chilling and irrefutable proof, among other things, of how unregulated media coverage actually aided the terrorists and their Pakistani controllers in stretching the ordeal out further by giving them a clear sense of what steps the Indian law enforcement agencies were taking. 

If you want to watch a gripping film on 26/11 that shows you what actually happened and leaves you with a lasting sense of unease instead of letting us pat ourselves on the back for sacrifice and moving patriotically on Terror in Mumbai is available on the internet. Watch it.

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