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Movies Forum Index » Movie Reviews Forum » Retrospective: International Guerrillas (1990)...
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| Shane Burridge... |
 Posted: Sat Sep 06, 2008 4:10 pm |
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International Guerrillas (1990)
The only way you'll see this all-singing, all-action, all-rabid Pakistani
absurdity is through grey market video, which is just as well
because the idea of sitting through it for nearly three hours in a
cinema is unthinkable. When UK author Salman Rushdie published
his novel 'The Satanic Verses' in 1988, the Ayatollah of Iran took
offense at its depiction of Mohammed and issued an open bounty on
Rushdie's head, forcing the author into seclusion. After a failed
assassination attempt by a lone extremist the following year,
enterprising Pakistani film producers figured they could give the public
what they wanted, and make a bit of cash on the side, by fictionalizing
an account of Rushdie's pursuit, capture and execution. It seemed, as
in the case of much Pakistani cinema, or 'Lollywood' movies, that
INTERNATIONAL GUERRILLAS was unlikely to ever be seen by western
audiences, but the inclusion of Rushdie as a character gave it a leg-up
into the bootleg market, and to the embarrassment of Pakistan's film
culture, found an audience of schlock aficionados.
You'd have to be a diehard aficionado to tackle GUERRILLAS in one
sitting: it takes nearly an hour before the opening credits appear to
announce the central characters as the guerrillas of the title. By this
time they've already had practice beating up a few bad guys (though
everybody would be easier to tell apart if they didn't all have the same
mustache) and ready to do battle armed only with their list of Salman
Rushdie insults, three Batman disguises, and a direct line to Mohammed
for divine intervention; to wit, a flying Koran that fires lightning bolts.
The next hour and a half is a shambles of various chases and shootouts
until the inevitable showdown with Rushdie on his private island fortress.
This finale contains a Pythonesque singalong which, even with half of
the cast chained to crosses, doesn't seem any less absurd than the five
previous musical numbers performed by sexily-gyrating young girls
(I'm sure The Prophet would have approved) who insistently sing about
how attractive they are. It should be conceded that the two heroines in
the film are easy on the eye but with names like 'Dolly' and 'Shagutta',
they sound like they would have been better off in a Pakistani Austin
Powers movie.
As in India's 'masala' films, GUERRILLAS pulls out all the stops to create
a mixture of adventure, romance, comedy, espionage, musical
interludes, and Rushdie being blown up. The end result looks like it was
edited on steroids - EVERY character gets a reaction shot or a smash
zoom whenever anything happens, and you'll lose count of how many
times the director includes a close-up of someone's feet landing on the
ground. You'll laugh at how awful the film is at first, but find it difficult to
keep it up before halfway through. Stick with it though - by the final act,
the film has gone so far over the top that it is parodying itself, and among
the histrionic emoting you'll get such choice lines as "We'll mutilate your
evil face so bad that even Satan won't recognize you!". 20th-century
architecture may have argued that less is more, but GUERRILLAS decisively
demonstrates that more is less. Characters deliver jingoistic diatribes at
every opportunity and the frustratingly dramatic background music never
stops. Rushdie himself is portrayed as a James Bond supervillain whose
glasses are always poised on the bridge of his nose to better facilitate evil
leering, all of which must have been much to the bemusement of the real
Rushdie, who in any other film would been disturbed to see himself
assassinated in effigy. Instead, he found GUERRILLAS so far removed from
reality that he couldn't see any harm in allowing it to be screened in the UK.
It would be unfair to assume all Pakistani films are as bad as this one, but if
this is the sort of thing that's expected to garner big box-office receipts in
their cinemas then it doesn't provide an incentive to seek out others.
sburridge at (no spam) hotmail.com
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