AB TAK CHHAPPAN (India – 2004)
Directed by: Shimit Amin
Starring: Nana Patekar, Yashpal Sharma, Revathi

In Mumbai there are encounters – incidents between police and thieves where the bad guys wind up mysteriously dead and no witnesses can be found to say a cop pulled the trigger. There are also encounter specialists: cops who work as hitmen for the department, rubbing out criminals on command. Produced by Ram Gopal Varma and directed by first-timer Shimit Amin, AB TAK CHHAPPAN is the story of an encounter specialist whose days are swiftly drawing to a close. Sadhu (Nana Patekar) is the doomed encounter specialist who crossed the line so long ago that he doesn’t even remember what it looks like anymore. With 56 notches on his belt, and competing with a colleague to get to number 57, Sadhu coolly threatens gangsters on his cell phone while driving his wife to work, interrupts casual conversations with a bullet and fabricates evidence as easily as breathing.

Sadhu is played by Nana Patekar, one of India’s greatest actors. Patekar only appears in one movie every year or two, which is almost like being dead in the Indian film industry, and his first love is theater. He brings the kind of intensity to his charismatic performance that the great 19th Century actors brought to Shakespeare and AB TAK CHHAPPAN is anchored by his charismatic, corrupt, larger-than-life vigilante. The movie is loosely based on the life of Daya Nayak, a gregarious, glad-handing vegetarian who is also a real life encounter specialist claiming to have survived 83 encounters in 3 years. Ruthlessly realistic, AB TAK CHHAPPAN is a movie where the gunfights take ten seconds, the good guys are murderers, and the only rich people are crooks.