Kaante

Kaante
Theatrical release poster
Directed bySanjay Gupta
Written byMilap Zaveri
(dialogue)
Screenplay bySanjay Gupta
Yash-Vinay
Produced byPritish Nandy
Film Club Limited
Larry Mortoff
Sanjay Sippy
StarringAmitabh Bachchan
Sanjay Dutt
Sunil Shetty
Lucky Ali
Mahesh Manjrekar
Kumar Gaurav
CinematographyKurt Brabbee
Edited byBunty Nagi
Music byAnand Raj Anand
Vishal–Shekhar
Lucky Ali
Gregor Narholz
Production
companies
White Feather Films
PNC Films
Release date
  • 20 December 2002 (2002-12-20)
Running time
145 minutes
CountryIndia
LanguageHindi
Budget₹300 million[1][2][3] ($6 million)[4]
Box office₹43 crore (equivalent to ₹164 crore or US$20 million in 2023)  million[2] ($9 million)[4]

Kaante (lit. 'Thorns') is a 2002 Indian Hindi-language action thriller film[5][6] directed by Sanjay Gupta, written by Milap Zaveri, and starring an ensemble cast including Amitabh Bachchan, Sanjay Dutt, Sunil Shetty, Lucky Ali, Mahesh Manjrekar, Kumar Gaurav, Namrata Singh Gujral, Rati Agnihotri, Rohit Roy, Isha Koppikar and Malaika Arora.

Set in Los Angeles, the film follows six Indian men who are detained without evidence by the police. Feeling wronged and vengeful, they team up to plot a bank heist that would leave the Los Angeles Police Department penniless. However, once things go out of hand, they start suspecting each other's identities, resulting in violence and chaos.

Kaante was heavily inspired by Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs (1992) as well as the film that inspired it, Ringo Lam's City on Fire (1987).[7][8] According to Tarantino, Kaante is his favorite among the many films that were heavily inspired by his work.[9]

Kaante was released theatrically on 20 December 2002. The film was a success at the box office despite clashing with Saathiya, another box office success, with first-week earnings of £1.8 million in India, nearly $1 million in the United States, and £268,507 in Britain.[10] The film's final worldwide gross was ₹430 million[2] ($9 million),[4] including ₹ 331.2 million in India and $2.05 million overseas.[2]

  1. ^ Unnithan, Sandeep (17 September 2001). "Indian films promise new thrills as filmmakers import state-of-the-art gizmos from Hollywood". India Today. Archived from the original on 20 December 2017. Retrieved 12 March 2016.
  2. ^ a b c d "Kaante". Boxofficeindia.com. Archived from the original on 29 August 2015. Retrieved 9 July 2016.
  3. ^ Govil, Nitin (2015). Orienting Hollywood: A Century of Film Culture Between Los Angeles and Bombay. NYU Press. p. 64. ISBN 9780814785874. Retrieved 12 March 2016.
  4. ^ a b c "PACIFIC Exchange Rate Service (48.6 INR per USD)" (PDF). UBC Sauder School of Business. University of British Columbia. 2002. p. 3. Archived from the original (PDF) on 12 May 2015. Retrieved 21 November 2017.
  5. ^ "I am too old to be wild". Rediff.com. Archived from the original on 21 June 2020. Retrieved 19 June 2020. We made Kaante because we believed the audience was ready for a Hollywood kind of action thriller.
  6. ^ "'Kaante' goes to Hollywood, where it always wanted to belong". Scroll.in. Retrieved 23 May 2017. Sanjay Gupta's action thriller shares screen space with Quentin Tarantino's 'Reservoir Dogs', the movie it blatantly copied.
  7. ^ "The Reservoir Dogs Remake You Probably Don't Know About". Screenrant. Retrieved 4 February 2023.
  8. ^ "Movies: An interview with Sanjay Gupta". Rediff. 27 July 2002. Archived from the original on 21 October 2012. Retrieved 16 November 2014.
  9. ^ Subhash K. Jha. "Tarantino likes the cop-y & robber tale". The Times of India. Archived from the original on 18 October 2015. Retrieved 20 January 2017.
  10. ^ "Kaante revives Bollywood". bbc.co.uk. 6 January 2003. Archived from the original on 19 September 2016. Retrieved 3 September 2016.