Déjà Vu: Five Bollywood Remakes You Can Stream

Enjoy a musical take on ‘Scarface,’ a ‘Godfather’ homage, an ‘Oldboy’ replica, and more

“Dil Bechara” (2020) is a remake of “The Fault in Our Stars” (2014).

Still frame from “Dil Bechara”

The movie remake is as old as cinema itself, dating back to Georges Méliès’s 1896 short film Une partie de cartes, a copy of Louis Lumière’s Partie de cartes.

As the medium expanded over the next century, so too did its cultural cross-pollination. In 2017, cinematic remixer Quentin Tarantino—who has long been influenced by Asian films—scheduled an unconventional lineup at the New Beverly Cinema, his Los Angeles movie house. The director’s hit 1992 crime-caper Reservoir Dogs played alongside its unlicensed 2002 Bollywood mimicry, Sanjay Gupta’s Kaante (or “Thorns”), which Tarantino claims to have admired, and alongside the 1987 Hong Kong thriller whose story and climactic standoff had influenced Tarantino in the first place: Ringo Lam’s City On Fire. It was a minor footnote in the history of repertory programming, but this triptych encapsulated the cycle of ideas and images as they changed hands between East and West, throughout the 20th century and into the 21st.

For fans of Bollywood—India’s mainstream Hindi-language film industry—this exchange is a default setting. Hindi remakes are common, and they run the gamut from homage to blatant knockoff, with official retellings becoming the norm only recently (Paramount’s Bollywood Forrest Gump remake, Laal Singh Chadha, released this past August). Sources for these reproductions range from India’s own Southern film industries (in languages like Tamil and Telugu), to East and Southeast Asian thrillers, to the water well from which most global filmmakers drink: Tinseltown. Practically every well-known Hollywood classic has a Bollywood equivalent, from Elia Kazan’s 1954 boxer drama On the Waterfront (which became Vikram Bhatt’s Ghulam, or “Slave,” in 1998), to Roman Polanski’s 1974 neo-noir Chinatown (which informed Navdeep Singh’s 2007 thriller Manorama: Six Feet Under), to Jonathan Demme’s 1991 horror film The Silence of the Lambs, whose 1999 rip-off Sangharsh (“Conflict”) not only foregoes the story’s cannibal element, but turns its version of imprisoned serial killer Hannibal Lecter into a romantic co-lead. The film is also a musical.

Just as often, the way these stories are told and retold can lead to works that become culturally iconic in their own right.

By making such departures, these adaptations do, on occasion, miss the point of their respective originals, but they’re born from a cinema culture that is, at once, more culturally conservative and more celebratory than those from which it draws. Just as often, the way these stories are told and retold can lead to works that become culturally iconic in their own right. The following recommendations might seem familiar, but they’re also gateways into an industry to which many Western viewers remain agnostic. After all, for those who grew up with these remakes as their primary cultural touchstones, some are even bona fide classics.

Agneepath (Based on: Scarface)

Brian De Palma’s Scarface—the 1983 gangster saga sketched in the vein of a Greek tragedy—was about an ambitious Cuban immigrant, Tony Montana, a role played with memorable fury by Al Pacino. It was remade from Howard Hawks’ 1932 original, a violent landmark inspired by real Chicago mobster Al Capone. Mukul S. Anand’s 1990 revenge musical Agneepath follows that transformative tradition. The film is based on the real-life Mumbai underworld don Manya Surve, the inspiration for lead character Vijay Chauhan, embodied with magnetic wrath by Bollywood mainstay Amitabh Bachchan. Anand dresses Bachchan in a crisp white suit evocative of Pacino’s Montana, and he even gives him a distinctly Scarface supporting cast, from a disappointed mother, to a best friend who falls for his innocent sister.

However, Agneepath—which means “path of fire,” and which takes its title from the poem of the same name by Bachchan’s father—is as much a De Palma remake as it is a deeply personal reflection on Bachchan’s career at the tail end of his action hero era. With his voice at its raspiest and his eyes at their most bloodshot, the 47-year-old superstar reprises his “angry young man” persona, which first launched him to stardom in the 1970s.

Agneepath is available to stream on Amazon Prime and Netflix, and available to buy or rent on Google Play and YouTube.

Zinda (Based on: Oldboy)

Shortly after Kaante—which is unfortunately unavailable to stream in the United States—Sanjay Gupta wrote and directed Zinda (or “Alive”), a beat-for-beat retread of the film that kicked off South Korean director Park Chan-wook’s “Vengeance Trilogy”: the ultra-violent 2003 psychological thriller Oldboy. Well, almost beat-for-beat.

Two key things stand out about Park’s cult classic. The first is its ingenuous one-take hammer fight scene, which unfolds in a lengthy hallway, and which Zinda re-stages with aplomb. The second—Spoiler Alert!—is its notorious incest plot twist. Gupta’s claustrophobic follow-up uses Park’s film as a blueprint, down to Sanjay Dutt’s scraggly hairdo as Balajeet “Bala” Roy, matching that of Choi Min-sik as imprisoned anti-hero Oh Dae-su. But despite setting up the original’s sadistic reveal in several ways, Gupta’s film refuses to take the plunge at the very last second (side note: my father guessed the twist in Oldboy just from watching Zinda). The 2006 remake is an instructive look at how adaptations can be restrained by censorship and cultural norms. However, it is also a taut and entertaining thriller in its own right, despite its unusually upbeat ending, and since the film clocks in at under two hours, it rarely lets its foot off the gas pedal.

Zinda is available to buy or rent on Amazon Prime.

Sarkar (Based on: The Godfather)

Traditionally, unlicensed Bollywood remakes would try to pass off their stories as original, but Sarkar mentions Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 masterpiece The Godfather in its opening credits. Ram Gopal Varma’s 2005 homage grafts Mario Puzo’s story onto the world of Mumbai politics. In the Don Vito Corleone role, famously played by Marlon Brando, the film conscripts Amitabh Bachchan—now in his imposing patriarch phase—as Subhash Nagre, the feared head of a political dynasty (inspired by real-life Mumbai politician Bal Thackeray). Keeping it in the family, Bachchan’s real-life son Abhishek plays Nagre’s heir Shankar, the fresh-faced Michael equivalent, i.e. the role played by a young Al Pacino.

Fittingly, while “Sarkar” can be loosely translated to “government” or “rule,” it is also—like the Don’s title of “Godfather”—a moniker of respect and reverence. With gloomy lighting, and a background score composed of aggressive religious chants, Varma’s film creates an eerie, imposing atmosphere that turns Coppola’s three-hour family epic into a seedy two-hour crime thriller, which, like the original, even spawned its own trilogy.  

Sarkar is available to buy or rent on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Google Play and Youtube.

Dil Bechara (Based on: The Fault in Our Stars)

John Green’s 2012 romance novel The Fault in Our Stars, about a pair of teenagers living with cancer, was inspired by Green’s real-life friend Esther Earl, a fan and teenage activist who had died two years prior. The book had a largely accurate Hollywood adaptation in 2014, while its licensed 2020 Bollywood remake, Dil Bechara (or The Helpless Heart), changes numerous specifics to accommodate not only a dance sequence, but several homages to Tamil action cinema. However, the death of its lead actor Sushant Singh Rajput a month prior to the film’s release resulted in a bittersweet spiritual alignment between the Hindi remake and Green’s original novel: both are now steeped in real-life tragedy.

Rajput exudes charm as Manny Rajkumar, a young filmmaker at death’s door who crosses paths with Kizie Basu (Sanjana Sanghi), an ailing girl who seeks closure after her favorite singer’s final song is left incomplete. The specter of loss looms over the film, but Rajput’s final role is one of defiant optimism in the face of oblivion; a fitting farewell to a star who shone brightly.

Dil Bechara is available to stream on Hulu, and available to buy or rent on Apple TV, Google Play and YouTube.

Sholay (Based on: The Magnificent Seven/Various) 

Written by legendary lyricist duo Salim-Javed, Ramesh Sippy’s 1975 Western Sholay (or “Embers”) follows two small-time criminals, Veeru (Dharmendra) and Jai (Amitabh Bachchan), hired by a former police officer with no arms (Sanjeev Kumar) to protect a village from the ferocious bandit Gabbar Singh, a scenery-chewing villain made instantly popular by the great Amjad Khan. Its basic plot resembles The Magnificent Seven, John Sturges’s 1960 remake of Shichinin no Samurai/Seven Samurai, the seminal 1954 period epic by Kurosawa Akira—a tale that was ripe for transformation. By the time Sholay was in production, the story in the Japanese original had traveled back-and-forth between cultures enough to feel like an ancient myth, its structure both reliable and ever-present. There had already been a 1970 Iranian co-production, Jean Negulesco’s The Invincible Six, and Sholay was also influenced by earlier Bollywood Westerns, like Narendra Bedi’s Khotay Sikkay (“Counterfeit Coins”) in 1974, which featured five magnificent heroes, and Raj Khosla’s Mera Gaon Mera Desh (“My Village, My Country”), which featured just the one.

Apart from The Magnificent Seven, Khosla’s 1971 western was perhaps the biggest blueprint for Sholay. Its magnificent avenger, Ajit, was also played by Dharmendra, and was hired by a former policeman with one arm (played by Jayant, the father of Gabbar Singh actor Amjad Khan) to protect a village from a bandit named…Jabbar Singh (Vinod Khanna). However, while Sholay was undoubtedly derivative, it ended up exceeding the sum of its parts, becoming arguably the go-to recommendation for those unfamiliar with Hindi cinema. Its success can be attributed to its unapologetic mix of high melodrama, Spaghetti Western action, and memorable musical numbers by R.D. Burman (some of which were remakes themselves). Its characters became so iconic that its whip-smart, instantly-quotable dialogue track was sold on cassette tape alongside its songs, and the film was so beloved that it became an unparalleled blockbuster phenomenon, running sold out in one Mumbai theater for five and a half years—lending definitive credence to the refrain, “Good artists copy, great artists steal.”

Sholay is available to buy or rent on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Google Play and YouTube.

Published on November 8, 2022

Words by Siddhant Adlakha

Siddhant Adlakha is a critic and filmmaker from Mumbai, though he now lives in New York City. They're more similar than you'd think. Find him at @SiddhantAdlakha on Twitter