Special 26: Don’t miss Pandey special

Special 26
Starring: Akshay Kumar, Kajal Aggarwal, Jimmy Shergill, Manoj Bajpai, Anupam Kher
Rated: 8.5/10
It’s films like these that give you reason to applaud a churning, emerging, brand-new and fearlessly experimental Bollywood which is changing mores of India’s song and dance tinsel town.
Special 26 is, well, special, really really special. It is thrilling, it is true-life, it is pacey and it is no-nonsense. It also holds on to the twist till the twist finally unfurls to take you wholly by surprise. It has actors who do their job as brilliantly as the editor does his, or the music director does his, or the director does his. Not a thing out of place is an achievement that comes out of the courage to make a different genre of cinema that is not slave to the box office dynamics. And yet this could be a blockbuster. In this sense this one is special as said earlier.
Director Neeraj Pandey is not new to this kind cut-to-piece film-making. After all, he brought to you A Wednesday on the shoulders of Naseeruddin Shah.
In Special 26, where he takes a leaf out of the fake CBI heist that had hit a Mumbai jeweller way back in 1987, he distributes the work between Anupam Kher and Akshay Kumar both of whom do their jobs rather flawlessly. Akshay, the ultimate conman with a heart of gold and Kher as the most unassuming one from the backwaters of Chandigarh have the world singing to their tune in all parts of India.
Not to mention, the lean-mean Manoj Bajpai who gives new meaning to cophood with his frowning glory which finds competition only in his unflinching commitment to track down criminals.
Can’t say much about the story here because that would be like giving away the fun, but the way the subject has been chiselled out of the underbelly of crime, couched so well in appropriate dose of humour at the most appropriate times, Special 26 is one of those films that come as gems embedded in an ensemble of rare chic.
Pandey — and his kind of directors — are those crucial spokes in the wheel of time that will be making Bollywood more happening that Hollywood in subjects like the one you will see in Special 26.
Source: Published  in The Sunday Pioneer, 10 February, 2013

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