Mugamoodi

I can find some really interesting things to watch at times on Netflix. The other night I sat down and watched a film called Mugamoodi. Yeah. Weird name. I know.

           The film stars a young man who goes by the name Bruce Lee. (After all, since Bruce Lee is his idol, why not have people call him by that name? Who knows, there might be some kid out there who insists on people calling him LeBron James!)  Bruce (played by Jiiva) is a student at a local martial arts school and, after studying for many years, has become quite good. That's the upside to the start of this story. It goes downhill from there for this poor boy. The first time he meets a girl who really catches his eye, she sprays pepper spray in his face and gets him arrested. It doesn't help his case when her father is the local Deputy Police Commissioner (played by Nassar). To make matters even worse, Bruce's father thinks he is an absolute loser and his teacher forbids him and the other students to used the martial arts that they have learned!

          So what's a boy to do? In order to get the girl of his dreams, Shakthi (played by Pooja Hegde), he decides to dress up as a generic superhero and try to woo her. (Yeah. That's the first idea I can think of doing to get a girl!)  However, when he tries to do this, he lands right in the middle of a police investigation of a group of murdering bandits who have been targeting wealthier and wealthier victims. Despite his teacher's wishes, he is forced to rely more and more on his martial abilities to get him out of trouble.

          Despite the long runtime of the film (It clocks it at a whopping 150 minutes.), I never really got bored watching it. As a matter of fact, I was pleasantly surprised at the quality of the film. The martial arts was choreographed by none other than Hong Kong director Tony Leung (Who directed Ip Man with Donnie Yen). I actually got excited when I saw his name in the opening credits! That being said, the fight scenes did not disappoint. Every scene was well shot and well executed. All of Bruce Lee's moves seemed to be based primarily on Wing Chun, which made the infighting particularly fun to watch.

          Oh yeah, there are ninjas! I forgot to mention the ninjas! You'll get it when you see the movie. This is where I stop, in order to keep from leaking spoilers. I hate people who do that.

          There were only a few things that I thought were kind of weird. One had to do with smoking. At the beginning of the film there was the equivalent of a surgeon general's warning that smoking is bad for your health. But, for whatever reason, every time someone lit up a cigarette in the film, another warning came up along the bottom of the screen. Odd, right? The other thing I have to mention is the fact that this movie comes from India. (This is a Tamil film to be exact.)   That means that you have to have music in darn near every film. Mugamoodi has no less than three music video moments in it! It's also kind of strange that nearly every actor/actress wants to be known by a single name! Despite these oddities (to us in the West, at least) this turned out to be a really good film. I hoping to see more like it pop up here in the U.S. sooner rather than later.