Review on Broken Horses Movie

Vidhu Vinod Chopra's English Film Broken Horses is a different, yet emotionally packed take on the American Wild West, set somewhere near the Mexican border.
Twenty Five years later, Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s Parinda has returned as Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s Broken Horses, with Mexico’s dust bowls replacing Mumbai’s mean streets, a ranch on a lake replacing a crucial boat, two brothers joined by love and circumstances now also tied by a slight mental disability, and a lot less blood and a lot more conscious style.
Narrated in a linear fashion, it is the story of Buddy Heckum, a sensitive slow learner, his musically inclined younger brother Jacob Heckum, who is also known as Jackey, and a conniving gangster Julius Hench, who in order to safeguard his own interests, tries to separate the two brothers. This forms the crux of the tale.



Fifteen years ago after the death of their father Gabriel Heckum, the Sheriff of this border town, the boys are left to fend for themselves. Julius takes Buddy under his wings. He instigates them with words such as, "There are lots of bad people out there, somebody got to stop them... Miguel Stanton killed your dad and you cannot let him get away. You kill him."

‘Somewhere near the Mexico border’, a sheriff is killed while admiring how good a shot his elder son, Buddy — otherwise considered rather “slow” — is. The younger one, Jacky, is more inclined towards violin than guns, and is safely at school at the time.

Buddy takes revenge. This "job" was his initiation into the crime world. And in order to protect Jackey from his world of crime, the ever caring older brother packs him off to New York to let him pursue his dream of becoming a violinist.

Jacky finds a girl, a pretty Italian no less, to marry, and Buddy calls him home to givehim his wedding gift. Soon enough, for reasons that remain unconvincing, things unravel and complicate.

The intelligently written screenplay and dialogues, especially the summation of the title of the film, by Mr Chopra and Abhijat Joshi, more than make up for the deficit in the design scheme.

Tom Stern's camera work is excellent. He has a flare for wide angled panoramic shots. Some of the shots of the Wild West and Jackey's Ranch, captured in the twilight zone are worth noticing. So is the underwater shot during the climax.

Shot by Clint Eastwood’s favourite cameraperson, and with Goodfellas writer Nicholas Pileggi on Board as consultant, Broken Horses also gets its settings right, from its dust-track roads and dust-lined vehicles to its one-horse towns.

However, should you keep waiting for all of it to amount to something more, you would be disappointed.