NYAFF 09 Review: QUICK GUN MURUGAN

[Our thanks to Pat Dahn for the following review.]

QUICK GUN MURUGAN is a blast. Based on a series of shorts made for MTV India in the early 90s, it successfully expands that colorful 'attitude' into a feature-length movie. Now, I never watched MTV India and my recollection of the US version is fuzzy at best, but I do remember those strange little animations and station spots were always the most interesting things they programmed.

Quick Gun Murugan is a vegetarian cowboy - a sweet, gentle man of values who shoots many people in the head. An outlandish figure, colorful beyond convention, he seems as out of place in 1982 as he does in modern Mumbai.

The bullets bounce off tea kettles, through coconuts, and into meat-eating enemies' foreheads as Murugan leaves a trail of precision gunplay while he tracks down Rice Plate Reddy, ruthless leader of the distinctly non-veg MacDosa corporate empire. The movie fires wildly too (if not as accurately as QG), gleefully mowing down genres and conventions as it romps through set pieces- from a gunfight on wires at the Institute of Coconut Tree Climbing to a duel to ten paces in the middle of Mumbai traffic.

And the body count grows and grows, under layers of dayglo unreal violence. The movie often shares a palette with TEARS OF THE BLACK TIGER, and I consider them to be sister-films in a way, with their musical numbers and pastel cowboys. MURUGAN is definitely the sillier of the two, more a pop-action amalgam than the BLACK TIGER's melodrama throwback.

In a way I feel like the movie really captures the free-for-all spirit of the festival, despite being in the minority- the lone Indian production. And tellingly, a six-armed image of Murugan is used in many of the festival's promo materials. I liked it anyway- QUICK GUN MURUGAN is fun, dumb, and highly recommended.

QUICK GUN MURUGAN screens July 1 at 5:30PM.

Review by Pat Dahn