Beeba Boys

Release Date: October 16th, 2015
Running Time: 103 minutes
Written & Directed by: Deepa Mehta
Starring: Randeep Hooda, Ali Momen, Waris Ahluwalia, Sarah Allen, Gia Sandhu, Gulshan Grover, Paul Gross

I grew up in the 1990s in East Vancouver—the time and place that the true events on which this movie is based took place. I went to the same high school that Bindy Johal went to. Johal is the real-life character that the protagonist of Beeba Boys, big-time criminal Jeet Johar (Randeep Hooda), is inspired by. In real life Bindy was several years older than me and was kicked out of Sir Charles Tupper Secondary School the year before I started there, so we never attended at the same time. I never knew Bindy personally, but our communities overlapped and I was acquainted with some of the same people that he was. A number of those people were caught up in the same activities as Bindy, and some met similar fates—murdered in their 20s.

In those days, social circles heavily intertwined amongst the youth of the working class, multicultural East Van neighbourhoods where I grew up. So it's difficult to critique this film in any impartial way because I was around at the time that the real events happened. To be fair, the filmmakers never, to my knowledge, claimed to be attempting a historically accurate depiction of the Indo-Canadian crime scene in 1990s Vancouver, but they did say the film was "inspired by true events". Extremely loosely inspired by, apparently, because it comes nowhere near to capturing the reality of how things actually were. 

One of many problems with this film is that it doesn't display Jeet Johar or any of his homies as individuals characteristic of the time and place that the real people they're based on existed in, but rather as stereotypical, one-dimensional gangster clichés. These were people who were most active in "criminal activities" between the ages of 15 and 30-years-old. The real-life Bindy Johal was 27 when he was killed, but his onscreen counterpart Johar is played by 39-year-old Randeep Hooda. One member of his crew is played by Waris Ahluwalia, who's in his 40s, and others appear to be in their 30s, or late 20s at the youngest. And they're portrayed as big-time, Soprano-like members of a Punjabi Sikh mafia. But they were actually a mix of young men who embodied a range of innercity qualities and a variety of ethnic backgrounds. Maybe it's true that many core members of Bindy's crew were Indian, but just as many were Fijian, spoke Hindi and not Punjabi, and were Muslim or Hindu and not just Sikh as the film depicts. And many others affiliated with him were of a whole range of other ethnicities—Chinese, Vietnamese, Greek, Portuguese, Italian, Serbian, Croatian, Indigenous, and so on. And a lot of them weren't so much gangsters as just kids from the neighbourhood who smoked weed and knew Bindy from school or mutual friends. While people had their main social groups, which were sometimes ethnically based, these groups commingled and hung out together in usually peaceful ways.

This was the beauty of East Vancouver in those days, and a big part of what made Bindy's story so compelling. He came from that same intermingling of different working class, multi-ethnic, immigrant East Van cultures as I did—but his character and ambition drove him to bigger and more violent endeavors, elevating him to the status of one of the most notorious Vancouver criminals of his time. But in many ways Bindy and his crew were just regular guys, with all sorts of other positive attributes in addition to whatever nefarious activities they might have been involved in.

Despite knowing all this, I tried to view the movie as impartially as possible, as an original crime tale in its own right, lack of accuracy aside. If a movie tells an engaging story then I don't much care how many liberties it takes with the truth. But Beeba Boys fails in this respect as well. A mild attempt is made at the beginning of the film to prescribe specific attributes to Jeet and the various members of his crew ("The Boss", "The Joker", "The Muscle", etc.), but beyond that there's little complexity of character illustrated throughout. All the stereotypical pitfalls of the gangster film genre are present: the war with a rival crime boss (“Robbie Grewal”, played by Gulshan Grover as an amalgamation of the real-life Dosanjh Brothers), the coke-addicted sexpot girlfriend (Sarah Allen), the double-crossing sidekick, etc. There's also the gang task force detective on Johar's trail (Dileep Rao as “Kash Sood”); a flimsy caricature of real-life former police officer and later West Vancouver Police Chief and B.C. MLA (a position he was forced to resign from due to accusations of election fraud) Kash Heed.

The gangsters have an overtly Middle Eastern style. But it's stated at one point that Johar and his crew members are mostly second- and third-generation Canadian immigrants—yet Johar has a prominent accent. So has he moved to Canada more recently then his compatriots, most of who were born in Canada? But he wasn't born in Canada himself? These are details that don't add up, displaying the overall sloppy execution of the movie. And writer-director Deepa Mehta gives them a distinct style of dress: Johar and his entire crew all wear dress shoes without socks, pants that ride up high on their legs, exposing their ankles, and brightly-coloured suits (yellow, turquoise, orange, and such). Kind of a preppy Indian version of Miami Vice or something. Also, several characters sport moustaches with twisted up tip ends. It seems these details are there to overtly remind us of their Indian origins, to differentiate them from all the other cinema gangster clichés that they embody. The real Bindy and crew didn't look like that—aside from their South Asian ethnicity these characters look nothing like the real guys. They were more likely to wear tracksuits and sneakers, or jeans and leather jackets and stuff like that. The film's title and name of Johar's crew Beeba Boys, we're told, means "good boys"—an obvious reference to Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas. But this film sure ain't no Goodfellas. Nowhere close.

Another problem with the movie is that it's set in present day, while the real events took place in the 1990s, culminating with Johal's murder in 1998. Granted, Indo-Canadian crime continues today in and around Vancouver, but why loosely adapt Johal's story then? It might've been better if the filmmakers did more research, set the movie in the '90s, and tried to follow the real story as accurately as possible. Vancouver is mentioned a few times in the movie, and parts of it were filmed in the city, but very few of its cultural or geographical features are highlighted—it could very well have been set in Los Angeles, Seattle, or Toronto.

Deepa Mehta is an accomplished filmmaker with a dozen features under her belt, many of which deal with Indian and/or Indo-Canadian subject matter. Her film Water (2005), for instance, is one that comes to mind as a great cinematic work. Set in 1938 India, that story's protagonist is a 7-year-old girl who is sent to live in an ashram for widows following her husband's death (yes, children were married off to grown men). It's a harrowing yet beautiful tale, and one very different in subject from Beeba Boys. The only real similarity is that the main characters in both films are Indian. So I was intrigued when I heard that Mehta was making a film based on Bindy Johal and Indo-Canadian crime in 1990s Vancouver. Unfortunately, as it turns out, she seems the wrong person for the job—perhaps at least in part because she was born in 1950. That alone is not necessarily reason for her to misunderstand the time and culture of the story that she's told—but having seen the result I can't help but think that her being a generation older than her characters affected her outlook. Having lived in Toronto since she emigrated there from India in 1973, Mehta obviously lacks a true understanding of Vancouver's cultural nuances. Instead she focuses on the Indian cultural elements, of which she is no doubt far more knowledgable than the East Van criminal youth culture of the 1990s. And so those elements are dialed in at best, neglected if not outright ignored, while the Indian elements are magnified—making it feel like just another ethnic organized crime film, lacking character subtleties and believable story details.

I was initially curious about this film, being personally familiar with some elements of the true story. In fact, some of my East Vancouver artist and cinephile friends and I have discussed making a movie about the neighbourhood youth crime scene in the '90s. We would've done it in more of a Menace to Society kind of style though, or maybe Mean Streets. So I was disappointed after watching Beeba Boys, because it's a poor telling of what could be a very compelling, multifaceted Vancouver story that now is unlikely to be attempted again anytime soon. On the other hand, since no one is likely to remember this movie, the opportunity still exists for me and my homies to do it right.
Rating (out of 5): ★½
• Nik Dobrinsky / Boy Drinks Ink
December 19th, 2015