The death of filmmaker Sanjay Gupta has returned attention to Kaante, his 2002 Los Angeles-set crime film that spent years in the shadow of Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. The comparison was repeated so often that the most quoted response eventually came from Tarantino himself.
A ‘rip-off’ that Tarantino chose to praise
Kaante followed six Indian men in Los Angeles who plan a bank robbery after trouble with the police. The ensemble included Amitabh Bachchan, Sanjay Dutt, Suniel Shetty, Mahesh Manjrekar, Lucky Ali and Kumar Gaurav.
Because of that plot and its standoff structure, critics often described the film as an Indian Reservoir Dogs. But Tarantino, speaking at the Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles in a conversation reported by The Times of India in 2007, called the film ‘fabulous’. He said that of the many Reservoir Dogs ‘rip-offs’ he had seen, he loved Hong Kong’s Too Many Ways To Be No.1 and Kaante.
The warehouse sequence was the moment that most impressed him. The film felt like its own thing, he said, until the scene snapped back to Reservoir Dogs — and he meant that as a compliment.
Why the warehouse scene worked
In Kaante, the warehouse is where suspicion finally becomes violence. After the bank robbery goes wrong, the six men begin to suspect that one of them is a traitor. The suspicion settles on Lucky Ali’s Maqbool ‘Mak’ Haider, whose cover as an undercover LAPD officer is exposed.
The confrontation then turns into a Mexican standoff, with the remaining gang members pointing guns at one another. Kumar Gaurav’s Andy escapes with the stolen money, while the others are caught in a deadly exchange of gunfire.
- The structure: betrayal, police infiltration and close-quarters tension collapse into one location.
- The Tarantino echo: guns, secrets and shifting loyalties do the work that action spectacle does elsewhere.
- The Gupta difference: the director argued that the characters’ individual histories made the story larger than a single plot.
The copy debate never quite closed
Gupta’s own position was more complicated than outright denial. In an interview with Cyrus Broacha, he said he had never watched Reservoir Dogs in full, finding it boring after the first 10 or 15 minutes. He argued that Kaante carried a considerably larger story because of the characters’ individual backgrounds, and he recalled that Tarantino had publicly expressed a preference for the way Kaante developed its characters.
For Hindi cinema followers, that argument remains useful. Kaante belongs to the early-2000s moment when Indian filmmakers absorbed global reference points but filtered them through star-led Hindi film conventions. Its legacy sits in that in-between space: openly indebted, yet defended by the very filmmaker it was accused of imitating.
Source: The Economic Times
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