Written by Ritesh Shah Directed by Nishikant Kamat Running Time: 2:17 Rated R for violence and some brutality throughout. B-

Force was a brutally violent film that ends up being very depressing, and yet I kind of enjoyed it because of the cast/characters.

Yash is a narcotics officer who leads an almost vigilante group of four which wipes out the drug trade in the city. Except it was all part of a plan for Vishnu to take over the drug trade himself. Yash meets Maya and almost immediately the two fall in love. But this puts them all in danger, because when Yash's group takes out Vishnu's brother, Vishnu will do everything he can to wreak havoc on their lives.

The first 2-3 scenes of Force made me think this was going to be an extremely, extremely cheesy movie. The movie starts with Yash (John Abraham) getting blasted out of a house and onto the face of a cliff where he bounces around for a second before catching himself and pulling himself up to safety. We then flash back to how we got to that point, and the next scene shows the beautiful Maya (Genelia D'Souza) getting ready to go to work. It's a montage sequence with cheesy music and playful scenes where one second she's riding a motorbike and then is suddenly in a car surrounded by kids with flowers. But the movie starts to pick up from there. We see Abraham, who could and should be in a movie like The Expendables because he looks like he's fit right in with the biggest action heroes in the U.S., beating up some criminals outside of Maya's school. And then the two have a bunch of chance encounters and soon fall in love. And amazingly, their relationship was the best part of the movie. Abraham does a good job of being the tough guy with a heart of gold inside. He tries really hard not to show the cracks in his hard exterior, but Maya makes them come through. And Genelia D'Souza was brilliant as Maya. It was the first time I've been a Bollywood film where I thought the female lead was how a real woman would be. She didn't take lip from Yash, she didn't take everything overly seriously - she was just having fun. She called him on his bullshit and kept everything playful. I really, really liked her character and thought she was the center of the movie.

The movie, while still keeping some cheesy and unintentionally funny scenes, was really violent. And it was also a test of whether you think vigilante justice is OK in a corrupt world. Yash and his fellow officers have absolutely no problem shooting first and asking questions later. And sometimes not asking questions at all. It's not the best light to shine on a police force, but they make up for that by taking the bad guy and turning him into a stone cold killer. And I appreciated the movie for doing that. Most of the time bad guys make threats but never carry them out, or end up being caught at the last second by the hero. Not in this movie. I don't recall the last film of this nature where so many characters were killed, and sometimes in brutal ways. The final fight between Yash and Vishnu was straight out of a WWE match, and while the fact that Yash was even there was ridiculous (he had been shot 3 times a couple of hours earlier), it was a great sequence. But this movie is very unapologetic in the way it manipulates the audience because they set up all the characters in such a way that you really like the good guys. There was enough information given about each of the four officers that you cared about each of them more than you normally would. And that's the glue that held this movie together. This was one of the few times that I thought the characters were really well thought out and I cared about each of them. The good guys anyway. And once you're invested in them the entire movie because that much more interesting.

So overall, I liked Force. There was only one song and dance scene, and only three musical sequences at all, and there was some truly cheesy and ridiculous moments, but overall because I liked the characters, I liked the movie. But be prepared for a lot of bloodshed and some disturbing moments. This is rated R for a reason.