We all love stories of scams and heists. The opportunity of experiencing a roller coaster ride for 2 hours watching the story unfold is too tempting to ignore. This is the reason movies like Oceans eleven and its subsequent parts were so successful on the silver screen. India, the land of a billion people who constantly look out for JUGAAD and shortcuts has umpteen stories scams and Ponzi schemes. The award however for the most famous scam definitely goes to the Harshad Mehta story which was viral during the time when the word “viral” was connected with fever and not stories. So the story definitely is super interesting and hence we had the brilliant tv series “Scam 1992” and now we have the movie “Big Bull”. How do these compare with each other and which one is a better scammer .. umm… I mean entertainer. Let’s find out.
Storyline
Although both Scam-1992 and Big Bull are based on the Harshad Mehta story, there are some differences in the storyline. While Scam stays very close to the true events with real names and events, Big Bull has fictional names and a lot of fictional events. So Abhishek Bacchan is not Harshad Mehta, instead, he is Hemant Shah. Similarly, all characters have fictional names. Personally, I felt distant while watching Big Bull due to the fictional names and the fictional events that were present only for the purpose of drama. Scam-1992 flowed naturally like a river and I felt invested in the entire 8 hours of its running time.
Direction and Editing
If a story is the heart of a movie then direction-editing is the soul. There was a glaring difference between the tv show and movie in this department. While Scam-1992 had a brilliant direction by Hansal Mehta and slick editing by Sumit Purohit and Kunal Walve. Big Bull had neither. The direction looked like a contemporary 90s Bollywood while the editing was jarring with events stitched together with no coherence whatsoever. If you watched the tv show before the movie this difference would be very obvious.
Acting
Like the classic David vs Goliath, seasoned actor Abhishek Bacchan could not even come close to the effortless acting of Pratik Gandhi who lived and breathed the character of Harshad Mehta. He also had the authentic Gujrathi accent while Abhishek looked like he was struggling to conjure his “Guru” character and somehow match it with Hemant Shah. The same was the case with other actors in the movie who were more involved in the styling element of the character and didn’t get into the skin of it. Ileana who plays the role of Sucheta Dalal missed the character beat by a mile. She wore fancy kurtas and accessories that are synonymous with the current fashion trend. In the 90s women had a different taste and you could see that in Scam-1992 which was much more accurate. Shreya Dhanvantary who played the same role in Scam was just perfect.
Music
One of the strongest points of Scam-1992 was the music. The theme music was so good that there were a lot of memes floating around the internet that no one presses the skip intro button as they wanted to hear the music during every episode. Even the background score done by Achint Thakkar was exceptional. Big Bull was a huge letdown in this department… I mean why would you take a Carryminati song as your title music? It just didn’t make sense. The same was the case with the background score which was just not cohesive.
So, to conclude, Scam-1992 rightfully remains the best adaptation of Harshad Mehta’s story and also one of the best Tv shows coming from India ( It has an IMDB score of 9.2). Big Bull is a very forgettable affair with missed notes on every step. This could have been a career reviving role for Abhishek but sadly this bull didn’t have any rage whatsoever.
