Kidnap/Hero

Hero

This week’s release, Sanjay Gadhvi’s Kidnap is about a young man who abducts, for revenge, the daughter of the man he wants to punish.

One of the most popular films with the kidnap theme, was Subhash Ghai’s 1983 film Hero, which introduced Jackie Shroff and Meenakshi Seshadri. In this film, the bad guy is transformed by the power of love.

A criminal, Pasha (Amrish Puri) has to settle scores with retired cop Shrikant Mathur (Shammi Kapoor) and his police officer son Damodar (Sanjeev Kumar), so he gets Jackie Dada (Shroff) to kidnap the family’s beloved daughter Radha (Meenakshi Seshadri), in order to negotiate for his release from prison.

Jackie tells her that they are cops who have been asked to protect her from dacoits. Unlike the victim in Kidnap, this abduction victim is blissfully unaware for most part and has a picnic and singing songs on beautiful locations.

Eventually, Radha figures out the truth, but by then she is in love with Jackie (talk of Stockholm Syndrome!), and urges him to surrender. He does have a change of heart, surrenders and goes to jail for two years. The story actually ends here, but Ghai stretches it a bit more. Radha tells her brother Damoder that she is in love with Jackie, which obviously does not go down well with the family. To prevent Radha’s family from getting her married to somebody else, Jackie asks his friend Jimmy (Shakti Kapoor) to pretend to be in love with Radha, but he actually falls for her, and the family does not know that he is actually a smuggler.

When Jackie comes out of prison, he starts working in a garage and genuinely tries to reform, but he is still not welcome by the Mathurs. Also Pasha adds Jackie to his list of enemies, so he kidnaps Radha, so now the ‘hero’ has to rescue her and redeem himself in the eyes of her family.

The film’s intense romantic plot, its message of love conquering all odds, combined with a popular music score made Hero a big hit, and still one of Ghai’s most memorable after Karz. It had Laxmikant-Pyarelal at their best—that haunting flute solo, plus songs like Tu mera janoo hai, Ding Dong baby sing a song, Nindiya se jaagi Bahaar, Pyar karnewale kabhi darne nahin and Pakistani gypsy singer Reshma’s full-throated Lambi judai. Always worth revisiting.