Guns & Gulaabs Review: Featuring four outstanding performances from Rajkummar Rao, Dulquer Salmaan, Gulshan Devaiah, and Adarsh Gourav.
Guns & Gulaabs, produced by Raj and DK, is a marvellously zany criminal thriller that harkens back to the 1990s and sees the darkly piquant side of guys (and a couple of women) who gain strange joy from murder, mayhem, and meanness.
The gulaabs mentioned in the title and the name of the small town where the narrative is located are outnumbered in this amoral world where grownups and schoolboys both thrive on breaching the line. However, a ‘line of control’ runs across a nearby dhaba, dividing it into delimited and inviolable zones for two fighting gangs.
The handful of innocents who live in Gulaabgunj, nestled in the hills and dotted with opium fields, are at the whim of two criminal gangs, one of which is based in Sherpur, 30 kilometers away. They compete for control of the proceeds of a clandestine opium trade that operates outside the scope of government-licensed poppy growing.
Guns & Gulaabs begins with shots of a poppy farm, a sequence of two schoolboys discussing the females they are in love with, and a pursuit action that finishes with a killing in broad daylight. As a result, the series begins with all three main components of the plot – opium, love, and violence.
Guns & Gulaabs is a fantastic blend of artistic elan and storytelling chutzpah.
Ratnavali