Deva: Dreadful, dull, and degrading to minorities, Shahid Kapoor’s remake is a mess of megalomaniacal proportions | Bollywood News

Deva is like one of those movies that Mahesh Bhatt would ‘direct’ over the phone in the 90s. It has all the ingredients — a brutish hero with a heart of gold, plenty of flimsy female characters that ex purely to serve him, and plotting that relies almost entirely on contrivances and clichés. The only thing it doesn’t have is Avtar Gill in a supporting role, but guess what, Upendra Limaye more than makes up for it. Starring Shahid Kapoor, Deva is directed Rosshan Andrrews; it’s a remake of his Malayalam-language original, titled Mumbai Police. They downplayed the remake angle during the promotions, to the point that it almost felt like they were pretending that Deva was an original. And then, news began to spread about Andrrews having shot three different climaxes for the movie, perhaps in an effort to throw audiences off, or — and this is more likely — to lure them into theatres with the tease of something new.
Shahid Kapoor in a still from Deva.
It was a desperate move, emblematic of the times that the Hindi film industry is currently experiencing. Producers have convinced themselves that audiences aren’t interested in remakes any more, probably because most of them have already checked out popular South Indian hits on television. Shehzada flopped, Ba John flopped, Sarfira flopped. Kapoor’s own Jersey flopped as well. But if this logic were true, films based on horical events would also be bombing, as would adaptations of popular books. If this were true, Mrs — the Hindi remake of The Great Indian Kitchen — wouldn’t have inspired such vocal debate. Nevertheless, Andrrews introduced a new climax for Deva, one that deviates drastically from the ending of Mumbai Police. But little did they know that this new climax also reveals the filmmakers’ rather problematic mindset.
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Deva shares the same premise as the original film, which featured Prithviraj Sukumaran in the lead role. A rogue cop’s best buddy is murdered in broad daylight, pushing him to identify a mole in his department and bring the killer to justice. But before he’s able to reveal his findings to his boss, the cop meets with an accident and promptly forgets everything. He retraces his steps and decides — completely unmotivated — to solve the crime once again. But here’s where Deva begins to carve its own path. In the original, the main cop learns that he himself was responsible for his friend’s murder, after his friend discovered that he was secretly gay. The cop had him killed in an effort to keep his sexual identity a secret.

This was how Mumbai Police ended. This was also how its Telugu remake ended. But Deva deploys an entirely new climax, one that erases the only memorable thing about the original. In the remake, Kapoor’s character has his buddy killed for entirely different reasons. His friend discovered that Deva was the mole all along, and had been working for a gangster who’d taken him in as a child, like Matt Damon in Martin Scorsese’s The Departed. The obvious problem with this ending is that it’s plot-centric, and not character-centric like that of the original. But more worryingly, Andrrews — or, whoever decided to do this — seems to equate being queer to being a traitor. Only one of these things is actually a crime.
In both films, the central cop has his friend killed. But in Mumbai Police, he did it to protect himself from a society that wasn’t ready to accept him. Homosexuality was illegal back when the original movie was released, and pushing its protagon to such extremes, it seemed to acknowledge just how unbearable life could be for minorities in India. Deva, however, is motivated purely selfish reasons. Betraying your department and funnelling information to a gangster is, objectively, wrong. Being gay isn’t. In Deva, the ‘hero’ is an irredeemable person even before he is revealed to be a murderous criminal. Only one of these characters deserves our sympathy.
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Shahid Kapoor in a still from Deva.
Just last year, the Hollywood remake of the Danish-language thriller Speak No Evil was released with a dramatically different climax from the original. While the Danish movie ended on perhaps the most tragically nihilic note imaginable — the protagons were stoned to death the antagons in a quarry — the English-language remake presented a more palatable conclusion. There was little room for complexity. And as you’d expect from a mainstream Hollywood film, the story ended with a neat resolution where good triumphed over evil. Chrian Tafdrup, who directed the original, wasn’t impressed. “I don’t know what it is about Americans,” he said in an interview, noting that while people were ‘traumatised’ the climax of his movie, the atmosphere at a screening of the remake was like a ‘rock concert’.
All of this is to say that a climax can shape the very fabric of a narrative — it can affect the context, the subtext, and, in the case of something like The Sixth Sense, alter the manner in which movies are read. Remake culture is especially common in India, a country whose cultural diversity invites the opportunity for movies to be reimagined for different regions. Normally, these remakes are hack jobs, often orchestrated the same filmmakers behind the originals. Ram Gopal Varma did it, Gautham Vasudev Menon did it, Sandeep Reddy Vanga did it. But as long as the Indian film industry approaches remakes as an easy way to earn a quick buck, audiences will continue to thumb their noses at them. Deva flopped not because it is unoriginal, but because it’s a sloppy movie with horribly cheap visual effects and a detestable protagon; it’s a movie in service of its star, a movie that panders to an obsolete audience instead of pushing them towards the path of progress.

Post Credits Scene is a column in which we dissect new releases every week, with particular focus on context, craft, and characters. Because there’s always something to fixate about once the dust has settled.