Babumoshai Bandookbaaz is a 2017 Indian Hindi-language action thriller film directed by Kushan Nandy and produced by Kiran Shyam Shroff and Ashmith Kunder. The film features Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Bidita Bag in the lead roles. The movie did average business at the box office.
Plot
The story is set in the heartland of Uttar Pradesh whose political landscape is dominated by two politicians Dubey & Jiji. Babu Bihari is a hitman hired by both to get rid of their rivals. He kills for a paltry sum of 20,000, of which 5000 for the constable who gets him the hit job. Babu is ferocious & has a very direct approach to hitting his target. He has a reputation of clean hits without any fuss. Babu leads a very simple life, lives alone in a shanty in a remote location. One fine day Jiji offers him a hit job of a local muscleman. Babu goes survey the routine of his target. There he comes across Fulwa, a cobbler. He is smitten by her beauty and impressed with her headstrong attitude. He tries to court her, but his advances are rejected. Meanwhile, he kills his target, which is witnessed by Fulwa. In the police investigation, she refuses to identify him. Babu barges into her home and she stabs him instinctively with a sharp tool. Babu somehow manages to control the damage and tells her that he came because he was curious about not divulging any information to the police. She tells her that the guy he just killed and his two brothers raped her repeatedly. She tells him if he kills rest of the two brothers she would spend her entire life with him. Babu promptly kills the 2 remaining brothers. When he returns for his payment Jiji is furious with him. As he has ruined her plan. It was on the insistence of the younger brother, that she killed the elder brother to forge an alliance with the remaining 2 brothers for upcoming elections. This puts Babu in bad books with Jiji. Here Babu & Fulwa have a great time and enjoy each other's company. On the other hand, Dubey feels that the 3 men of Jiji are an obstacle to his prospects of winning the election. He gives the contract to kill all to Babu. Babu goes to Jiji & informs her about the contract. He throws an open challenge to her to save her men if she can. He is about to hit his first kill when a bullet is already shot missing its target. In the ensuing chaos, the victim escapes. It turns out that there is another hitman given the same contract. Babu saves the second hitman from the enraged mob. The second hitman is Bakey, who considers Babu as his guru. Although furious at first that he ruined his kill, Babu makes amends with Bakey. They decide to make this as a game. Of the 3 kills whoever scores higher will win & loser will have to leave the profession. Babu scores the first kill. He is about to score the second hit, but a cop loyal to Jiji intervenes. In the ensuing scuffle, Babu is hit in the shoulder. He takes him in his police jeep and is just about to depart, when Bakey sneaks in as a postman and scores the kill. The cop is furious takes him to a jungle to investigate. Babu is rescued by Bakey and takes him to his home. Fulwa removes the bullet from his body & heals him back to health. She is impressed by his suave looks & strong physique. A chemistry seems to boil amongst the two, which Babu also notices. Babu offers them to spend a night together, shocked at first Fulwa berates him & walks away. Bakey reluctantly backtracks saying that he was going along with their dance & booze filled merriment. On hearing this Babu tells Bakey that he was actually testing their integrity & if they had tried spending the night together he would have killed both of them. After recovering from his injury Babu and Bakey collaborate to kill Triloki the last target & closest aide of Jiji. They create a chaos in the rally & abduct him from there in the guise of constables. After killing him they sit near a railway bridge to celebrate their victory. After moments of drunken banter, Bakey reveals that the contract was for 4 people & shoots Babu point blank. Babu falls off the bridge into a cargo train. Next, we see Babu waking up in a hospital with long hair & beard, apparently from a long coma. He clean-up himself & returns. His cop friend reveals that after the death of Triloki, Jiji got her entire force to his location, set his house on fire, raped & burnt Fulwa as well. Babu is completely heartbroken & swears vengeance for the blood of all the traitors. The first locates Bakey & just as he is about to kill him, Bakey explains that he just executed his contract, principally Babu respect that. He spares his life because Bakey had saved his life in the past. Bakey tells him that Dubey revealed his address to Jiji. Thereafter he goes on a killing spree & kills all his nemesis. In the end, the secretary of Dubey gives Babu one more contract. Babu refuses & says that he has left the business. He gives him an address & tells him that he has a strong motive to take this contract. Babu goes to the address & instinctively avoids getting stabbed from a sharp tool, unmistakenly from Fulwa. He is surprised to see her alive and she also has his son. Then comes Bakey. It is then revealed that Bakey & Fulwa fell in love the moment they met. Fulwa gives Bakey contract to kill Babu. Babu kills Bakey by tricking him into a Russian roulette styled game. He kills Fulwa as well for her betrayal and burns both of them on a pyre and keeps the child. In the end we see babu raising the child after pledging away from crime. One day while going through the notebook of the child he finds that the child has drawn a picture of a family in it. While looking at the picture his eyes suddenly widen in surprise as he sees the same child approaching him with a gun held up. At the end, a shot is heard with the words "What goes around comes around".
as Babu plays the role of a sharp shooter for which he took special lessons in handling guns and action. Prague based cinematographer Vishal Vittal was signed in for the film and adds an international look to the rustic landscape of Uttar Pradesh while the crisp dialogues of Ghalib Asad Bhopali adds humour and spark to the desi flavour and dialect. A special dialect coach was engaged at the shoot to capture the inherent flavour. Detailed research was done for costumes and sets to give an authentic look. All the songs were choreographed by.
Filming
Principal photography of the film's first schedule began in, June 2016, in Uttar Pradesh. The first schedule was completed in July 2016. The film shooting was wrapped up in January 2017 and is due to release in 25 June 2017. The film is made in only 5 crore Indian rupees including print and advertisement.
The film was released in India on 25 August 2017 in 1,200 cinemas.
Critical response
, Babumoshai Bandookbaaz holds a 44% approval rating, on review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, based on nine reviews with an average rating of 4.5 out of 10. Rajeev Masand of News18 gave the film a rating of 2.5 out of 5 and said that, "It’s a guilty pleasure at best, provocative and titillating. But it’s also overlong and derivative, and gives one of our finest actors little room to do much more than repeat himself." Rohit Vats of Hindustan Times gave the film a rating of 2.5 out of 5 and said that, "Babumoshai Bandookbaaz appears superficial because it fails to explore characters and their idiosyncrasies. It’s a film pretending to be a stylishly raw gangster saga originated in the interiors of the Hindi heartland, but in reality, it’s nothing more than another attempt to look at the crime prone lower strata of society through a rose tinted glass." Meena Iyer of The Times of India gave the film a rating of 3 out of 5 saying that, "The screenplay could have definitely been tighter. Yet Kushan Nandy gives you a film that you find yourself compulsively watching." Namrata Joshi of The Hindu praised the performances of Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Jatin Gandhi and Bhagwan Tiwari and concluded her review saying that the film is, "Yet another revenge drama set in UP badlands that lacks cohesion despite some strong performances." Saibal Chatterjee of NDTV gave the film a rating of 1.5 out of 5 and said that, "As capricious as its unfounded title, Kushan Nandy's rough-hewn hinterland noir Babumoshai Bandookbaaz is a roaring mess. It misfires on most counts." Shubhra Gupta of The Indian Express gave the film a rating of 2 out of 5 and said that the film has interesting characters but the story has nothing new to offer. Udita Jhunjhunwala of Live Mint criticized the film saying that "Kushan Nandy’s Babumoshai Bandookbaaz is a low-calorie version of Gangs of Wasseypur" in which "Nawazuddin Siddiqui reprises the sort of character audiences have already seen him perfect."
