Offered a lifeline though by veteran filmmakers.
By Raif Karerat
WASHINGTON, DC: “Broken Horses” is director Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s American debut and a film he made it to prove a point.
“Bollywood is looked down upon by Hollywood, whether you like it or not. They think we do over-the-top, song and dance. They think we can’t do what they do. I wanted to show them that we can do something as good as them, if not better,” Chopra said in an interview cited by The Hindustan Times.
Unfortunately for Chopra, most critics have panned his first English-language film, with Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune saying that the film on which “Broken Horses” was based on, “followed the Bollywood custom of interpolating song and dance into any and every genre of movie,” and that he wished the new film had gone all the way and given everyone at least one number. “Instead, we settle for labored scenes of self-conscious montage,” he wrote.
Chopra’s offering is a loose English remake of the Mumbai-set 1989 crime drama “Parinda.” Chopra and co-writer Abhijat Joshi hatched the plan to Americanize “Parinda” after seeing Martin Scorcese’s “The Departed,” which in turn was successfully adapted from the Hong Kong thriller “Internal Affairs.”
Mike D’Angelo of the A.V. Club thought that Chopra had trouble establishing the correct tone right off the bat, calling the piece “a wan crime drama [that] plays like the equivalent of a Hindi novel that’s been run through Google Translate,” while Phillips opined casting was a major issue:
Anton Yelchin and Chris Marquette play long-separated brothers, Jake and Buddy, who have grown up in this Neverland of a mountainous desert. In the prologue, the boys are played by younger performers; their sheriff father (Thomas Jane) is quickly shot and killed by an unknown assailant, and we see Buddy taken under the wing of the local cigar-chomping, Stetson-sporting, Hank Quinlan-in-“Touch of Evil” crime boss named Julius Hench. He’s portrayed by Vincent D’Onofrio, and now and then, when delivering a line while flicking a dead bug off his rearview mirror, for example, D’Onofrio reminds us what character actors often do for a living: add the spice to a pretty dull pot of chili.
“Broken Horses” is “built around a distasteful portrayal of Buddy’s mental disability as both magical and monstrous,” wrote Sara Stewart of the New York Post, who also called it “an otherwise predictably violent tour through drug gang warfare on the Mexican Border.”
She noted at least the bloodshed was artful, providing stylistically colorful, decidedly macabre montages that cut back and forth between oranges being juiced and hired thugs being shot in the head.
While most critics may not have lent much praise to Chopra’s maiden effort in the U.S., as evidence by its 27 percent “tomatometer” rating on Rotten Tomatoes, filmmakers James Cameron and Alfonso Cuaron were among the few to publicly praise the piece, in its promotion.
Cameron, who directed “Avatar” among a host of other critically successful hits, called it “an artistic triumph” that “wraps slowly around you like a king snake and squeezes;” while the “Gravity” helmer claimed  “Broken Horses” overwhelmed him.
“The greatness of Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s films comes from the act that all his characters are driven by love,” he mused.
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VIDHU IS TRASH