The rising - ballad of the mangal pandey

By Ray Bennett for the Hollywood Reporter
Ketan Mehta's sweeping epic, "The Rising -- Ballad of Mangal Pandey," is a kind of Bollywood "Braveheart" as one courageous and doomed man confronts the might of the British Empire, plus there's singing and dancing.
Sumptuously designed and beautifully shot, the film will delight Bollywood fans but likely will fail to capture mainstream audiences with its melodramatic style and jarring combination of stirring action, brutality and musical numbers. For 100 years, the East India Company was the face of the British Empire, ruling one-fifth of the world and dominating the Indian subcontinent with the help of 300,000 Hindu and Muslim soldiers called Sepoys. In Mehta's tale, the introduction of a new rifle in 1853 brought down the most successful private company in history. The rifle used a cartridge that soldiers had to bite the end of in order to pour the powder into the barrel. But the company used the grease of pigs and cows to seal the cartridges, and so placing them in their mouths violated the Sepoys' faiths. Mangal Pandey (Aamir Khan) is one of the bravest Sepoys, having served with distinction in places like Afghanistan's Khyber Pass, where he saved the life of Capt. William Gordon (Toby Stephens). At first, trusting the Company lie that the cartridges do not use pig or cow grease, Pandey bites the bullet, but when the truth is revealed, he leads the Sepoy in a rebellion that for the first time unites all the various creeds, tribes and castes of the region. It sows the seeds for the end of the East India Company's reign, though India would not gain its independence from Britain for about another century. The saga is told in black-and-white terms with a clear division between good guys and bad guys. The dastardly villains are the ones in the red uniforms who speak as if they've just swallowed a plum. The only good British officer is, inevitably, Scottish.
The Bollywood style is so bouncy and optimistic, however that it's difficult to sustain the effect of an oppressed nation when everyone, even untouchables and slave girls, all appear so jolly. The hero is savagely beaten by five Company men, but shortly afterward he joins the beautiful pleasure house girl Heera (Rani Mukherji) in a jaunty dance number. Although the film is expertly rooted in its period, Heera seems to have been parachuted in from the 21st century with her cover girl eyes and MTV choreography. There are many bold statements about freedom and peoples' rights to their own cultures and faiths and a suggestion that there are modern versions of the East India Company at work in the world, which might well be true, but the message gets a bit lost amid all the happy singing people.