Zinda

<p>Software engineer Balajeet “Bala” Roy, is happily married to Nisha Roy. But before Nisha can inform him that she is pregnant with their child, Bala is captured by unseen assailants and imprisoned in a cell. After one year, Bala finds out that Nisha was brutally murdered. Bala is kept in total isolation for 14 years without knowing who imprisoned him and why. While in captivity, he learns martial arts from television, with the intention of using it against the people who captured him. He is finally released, again without explanation, and sets out for revenge. He befriends a taxi driver named Jenny, who helps him track his kidnappers. Bala tracks down the restaurant that served him food during his entire captivity and follows a delivery moped to his captors. Bala discovers that he was held in a private prison where people can pay to have others incarcerated. Bala tortures the owner Wong Foo for answers by pulling out his teeth with a ; he then finds out he was imprisoned for “talking too much”, and fights his way out of the building. Bala is injured during the fight, but a mysterious hooded man saves him and takes him to a taxi. The hooded man turns out to be Rohit Chopra. Soon Wong Foo kidnaps Jenny and tortures her. He threatens to remove Bala’s teeth with his own claw hammer but is interrupted by Rohit. Bala takes refuge with Jenny, and they have sex. Bala is informed that his daughter is alive. Bala’s friend Joy is killed, and Bala learns that his kidnapper is none other than Rohit. Rohit reveals his reason for kidnapping Bala. They went to high school together, where Bala had lusted after Rohit’s elder sister Reema. After Reema rejected him, Bala spread a rumour that she was promiscuous. She became the laughing stock of their school and committed suicide by setting herself on fire. Rohit blamed Bala for her death and engineered his imprisonment as revenge. Rohit tells Bala that he killed Nisha, and sent his daughter, who is now 14, to a brothel. Bala beats Rohit up and shoves him off a balcony, but grabs his hand and pleads with him to tell him where his daughter is. Defiantly, Rohit lets go of Bala’s hand and falls to his death. Bala then kills Rohit’s goons and Wong Foo. In the end, Bala learns that his daughter is safe; and Rohit had lied to him about selling her to a brothel to torment him. He finds her sitting on a riverbank, and goes to meet her. He happily lives with his daughter. The film received mixed reviews from critics, although and were singled out for praise. Bollywood Mantra praised the film saying, ” is a film that appears to be the darkest movie ever by Sanjay Gupta. A hard-hitting flick shot in Bangkok, it tells you a story never told before on the Indian screen. And to make Sanjay Gupta’s imagination come alive, who else but Sanjay Dutt is roped in to play the lead role. One of the most challenging roles ever by the deadly Dutt, it is sure to haunt you long after the screening is over”. of gave the film a rating of 7.5/10, praising the performances by and , while criticising the fact that much of the dialogue and story was copied from . Futuremovies.com gave the film 6/10 and said, “Technically and style-wise is flawless”, and praised Dutt’s performance, saying “it is probably the pinnacle of his career”. Subhash K Jha gave it 2.5/5 and stated that “the film belongs to Sanjay Dutt…. If the adventure-action genre in Hindi cinema needed a wake-up call, this is it”. Nikhil Kumar of gave the film 0.5/5 stars, saying “Sanjay Gupta’s movie works primarily because of its gripping, although unoriginal, story and a noteworthy acting performance by its frontman Sanjay Dutt”. The songs were composed by duo and released by . At a November 2005 press conference, representatives of Show East, the production company that released , expressed concern was similar to their film, and said they were investigating the similarities. They noted that at the time, they did not have the final version of available to compare with. They stated that if they found there was “strong similarity between the two [films]”, they would be contacting their lawyers.” reviewer and reviewer both note in their reviews of that they found the two films to be very similar in terms of plot, as well as in the depiction of specific scenes. reviewer Raja Sen wrote an open letter to Gupta, declaring he would not watch the film due to the plagiarism, and further revealed Gupta plagiarized the whole film in spite of categorically telling him he had lifted one scene from and claiming the rest was original. Another critic labeled it a “shameless rip-off” of where Gupta “steals not only the plot and characters but entire sequences, and pretty much the whole treatment of the original film.” refused to term it a remake since no rights were officially purchased, and went on to criticize its performances, storytelling and the blue tint. The website pointed out that while the film could be notable to the Indian audience for its experimental storyline around that time, this has not been the case over the years. Gupta continued to deny any of this when questioned during an interview. He later claimed it was not entirely inspired by , and mentioned how the latter was also inspired by instead.</p>