Balaji Motion Pictures Ltd. (BMPL) has announced its slate of six film releases in the upcoming year (2013). The line-up boasts of projects including co-productions with filmmakers like Vishal Bhardwaj, Anurag Kashyap and Sanjay Gupta alongside sequels of Balaji’s own properties such as <em>Once Upon a Time in Mumbaai</em> and <em>Ragini MMS</em>.

It was the biggest fall-out in the history of filmy friendships. Former best-friends Sanjay Dutt and Sanjay Gupta fell out over Dutt’s allegations of financial bunglings within the production company White Feather Films which the two had partnered since 2001. After jointly producing Kaante, Musafir, Zinda and Shootout At Lokhandwala in 2007, Dutt terminated his professional and personal partnership with Gupta amidst vociferous allegations of huge financial misappropriation.

Though he’s playing Dawood Ibrahim’s brother Sabir in Shootout At Wadala, Manoj Bajpai’s entire look in the film has been modelled on Pablo Escobar, the Colombian drug lord who was killed gruesomely in 1993. The resemblance to the notorious crime-lord is so uncanny that director Sanjay Gupta claims one can switch pictures of Escobar with Bajpai’s <em>Wadala</em> look without anyone being able to tell the difference. Escobar’s look, we may add, has been the source of inspiration for generations of Columbian youngsters.

Writer-director Sanjay Gupta is back with the second schedule of Balaji Motion Pictures’ Shootout At Wadala, having completed the first schedule some time ago. But there is a lot of difference between the filmmaker’s earlier films and this. While earlier movies were full of verve and style, in this film the filmmaker had to get down to the basics.