 "Broken Horses")
When I emerged from the cinema after James Cameron's Avatar, it was with mixed feelings. Yes, the special effects were undoubtedly fabulous and yes, he had created an amazing parallel world, but the script, storyline and dialogue were rather dull. As a reviewer in The New Yorker pointed out, Cameron could have easily hired one of the many talented scriptwriters in Los Angeles with a fraction of the money he had spent on special effects.
Vidhu Vinod Chopra's Hollywood debut, Broken Horses, which Cameron has incidentally described as an "artistic triumph" in its publicity campaign, evokes a similar reaction. You could admire Chopra for the scale of his ambition and the courage to attempt a Scorsese-inspired Hollywood Western at this stage of a celebrated career, but when the lights come on, you are left underwhelmed.
Set against the spare but breathtaking landscape of an American town bordering Mexico, Broken Horses is a film about the bond of brotherhood, of loyalty and revenge. Buddy (Christopher Marquette), the elder brother, is witness to his policeman father getting shot in the head when he was a boy. At this vulnerable stage, Buddy, who is not quite normal, is promptly taken under the wing of Julius Hench (Vincent D'Onofrio) and drops out of school to take care of his sensitive younger brother, Jakey (Anton Yelchin), who becomes a violinist in New York. Before his wedding to his Italian girlfriend, Vittoria (Maria Valverde), Buddy asks Jakey to come home for his wedding present, which he says is too big to bring to the ceremony.
Back home after eight years, Jakey realises his brother is a pawn in the hands of Hench, who has assumed the role of surrogate father, instructing him to kill "bad men". In the tradition of gangster films, the only way to escape, he is advised, is to do it from the "inside", as a member of the gang. He sets the plan in motion but, of course, things don't go quite as he planned.
That may not sound like a bad outline for a film, to be fair, but then neither is it anywhere in the league of Martin Scorsese's The Departed, which Chopra, in a recent interview to The Hindu, said was not very good when compared to its inspiration, Infernal Affairs. The comment sounds bombastic by itself, and even more so after you have seen Broken Horses. The film never draws you in completely and even at its most tense moments, it does not exactly leave you on the edge of your seat. It also has the odd ludicrous moment, such as when a horse follows Jakey and his fiancee into their ranch and is allowed to remain in the living room, for some reason.
D'Onofrio is convincing as the menacing and unscrupulous head of the mob and pater familias to Buddy and his other hoodlums in jeans and cowboy boots. Marquette, too, essays the role of a simple and trusting but violent elder brother well, while Yelchin is better in his pre-gang warfare days (since he is the sensitive one, he will naturally have long curly hair and wear glasses). Valverde does not have much of a role beyond being the pretty and charming girlfriend.
Chopra raised the bar for himself by taking on a completely different challenge in his 60s, instead of resting on his laurels as a successful director and producer of Bollywood films. He is not the only one to feel the need to prove himself in Hollywood - he joins the ranks of Anil Kapoor and Priyanka Chopra, among others. And with Broken Horses he may have caught LA's attention, with the reported backing of filmmakers like Cameron. But for a project in which he seems to have spent so much time (he told a reporter he took five years to write the script), effort and money and taken a big leap of faith, one is left expecting a lot more.
