Macho gangsters prowling about in slow motion aren’t the only characters in Sanjay Gupta’s latest movie Mumbai Saga , which is out on Amazo...
Macho gangsters prowling about in slow motion aren’t the only characters in Sanjay Gupta’s latest movie Mumbai Saga, which is out on Amazon Prime Video. The action drama’s unseen hero is Amar Mohile, the music composer whose steroid-charged background score is in nearly every scene.
The brief appears to have been to make the music match John Abraham’s punches as closely as possible. In this regard, the background score specialist certainly delivers.
Mohile has been providing alarm-bell scores for Hindi films since the early 2000s. Among his frequent collaborators are Ram Gopal Varma, Sanjay Gupta and Rohit Shetty. In the Sarkar and Singham series, Chennai Express, Simmba, Shootout at Wadala and Jazbaa, every twitch of the eyebrow or gnash of the teeth appears to have been accompanied by a 100-piece orchestra. Like his contemporary Julius Packiam, Mohile specialise in action dramas and has a recognisable sonic signature comprising stacked orchestras, heavy guitar riffs and blaring horns.
Mohile owes his rise to Ram Gopal Varma. Until the 2000s, Varma’s films about gangsters and ghouls had some measure of quietude. But following Sandeep Chowta’s seminal score for Satya (1998), Varma became obsessed with punctuating every scene with an exaggerated soundscape. The baton passed from Chowta to Mohile, and the decibel...
