The spy is the limit...

Will The Hero prove to be another Gadar? Well, this is what the producers of the film — the Shah brothers — are hoping for. And not without reason. They have invested Rs 50 crore while making a spy movie which reunites the Gadar team of director Anil Sharma and Sunny Deol and features Priyanka Chopra, Preity Zinta and the usual suspect — Amrish Puri.
Now, the obvious question: where has all the money gone? For starters, it has been spent on constructing lavish sets for the film and then hiring international stunt artists to give the action sequences in the film an edge.
While Devdas was made on a similar budget, it managed to recover its cost of making. Yes, there are chances of The Hero doing an encore, but the real answer lies in how the movie appeals to the masses: Sharma’s target audience. Admittedly, Devdas was an urban phenomenon and its box-office success was limited to big cities. But The Hero, like Gadar, aims to please everybody, specially the masses who propelled Gadar to more then Rs 50 crore business.
Will history repeat itself? Well, the plot certainly has. Like Gadar, The Hero is once again
about India and Pakistan and how only one man (Sunny of course) can foil the neighbouring nation’s plans. But ye audience maange more. And Gadar, at the end of the day, was the emotional story of a father wanting to reunite his son with the child’s mother. The Pakistani backdrop made this struggle larger than life.
Pakistan-bashing on the silver screen, specially when it is a cat and mouse game between an
Indian spy and the Pakistani authorities, offers tremendous scope for high-pitched dialogues and confrontations. But is that enough to send the cash register ringing? Well, cricket has shown that Pakistan bashing is a hit for sure!