The Big Bull was announced to release on Disney+ Hotstar back in 2020 when a few films were opting for OTT outing than the big screen owing to the coronavirus pandemic. Little did they know that Hansal Mehta will create a storm with Pratik Gandhi and make the masses fall in love with Scam 1992: The Harshad Mehta Story. The pressure on the film was instantly created by the viewers as Scam 1992 created a benchmark altogether.

NOT just saying this because of the crappy 'mahavari', Akshay Kumar, Padman anti-smoking PSA, missed by no one, that shows up, before this show starts. But in a Pavlovian sort of way, that really does prepare you for a theatrical screening to follow. Except, The Big Bull is unintentionally an OTT release. But it is in every way, a 'Bollywood' film, in terms of how you'd expect/imagine the life of a top, '90s stock broker, modelled on the infamous Harshad Mehta, to play out.

Kookie Gulati's The Big Bull faces two major disadvantages. The first is that Harshad Mehta, the stock broker who inspired the movie, has already served as the subject of a detailed web series. The second is that the multi-crore securities scam engineered by Mehta in the early 1990s, though by no means negligible, has been followed by other, more sensational frauds.

The protagonist of the new Hindi film The Big Bull is called Hemant Shah, but it is clear from the story, its location, the time period in which it is set and its covert promotions that it is based on the life of the infamous stockbroker Harshad Mehta. Even the convoluted opening disclaimer begins with the words "this film is somewhat inspired by true events".

Imagine a SparkNotes version of any of Shakespeare's works, say Othello. Now imagine the SparkNotes editor deciding to make Iago the good guy, the voice of true benevolence, who out of the purity of his purpose, helps Othello rid himself of his wife. Director Kookie Gulati's The Big Bull is that weird little SparkNotes version of stockbroker and bad boy millionaire Harshad Mehta's story. We already know who Shakespeare is in this allegory.

'I am and will always be the only Big Bull,' announces Hemant Shah at a so-called dramatic juncture in The Big Bull. It's one of the phoniest moments of an excruciatingly unconvincing film that's eager to capitalise on stockbroker Harshad Mehta's story of success and scam but too gutless to acknowledge his reality.

Granted that comparisons are odious but The Big Bull, with Abhishek Bachchan impersonating someone akin to Harshad Mehta without ever threatening to put Pratik Gandhi in the shade, simply isn't in the league of the excellently scripted, proficiently acted Scam 1992. Loosely based on the life and times of the controversial stockbroker, is unable to shrug off the shadow of the web show.

THE BIG BULL is the story of a common man's journey from rags to riches. The year is 1987. Hemant Shah (Abhishek Bachchan), a resident of Bombay, is working at Bal Kala Kendra on a modest salary. He is in love with Priya (Nikita Dutta), his neighbour but since he's not financially secure, he's apprehensive about asking her father for her hand in marriage.

The story of Harshad Mehta and his involvement in India's first major financial fraud has captured the imagination of today's burgeoning middle-class. His audacious acts of blatant financial skulduggery are as repulsive to some, as they are effective conduits of vicarious thrills to others.

Many moons ago, the 'God of Advertising', Alyque Padamsee told me that they sold dreams which men and women strove to make real. In Kookie Gulati's outing on Disney+Hotstar, The Big Bull, Hemant Shah says time and again that he sells dreams, helping the man on the street to achieve what he may have considered impossible. There is a very telling scene in the ploddingly long work with a runtime of about 150 minutes in which Shah (played by Abhishek Bachchan), a broker who has made it good on the Bombay Stock Market, is advising the elevator operator to first buy a tyre before getting a car.

Based on a real story, 'The Big Bull' follows the life and times of Hemant Shah - a smalltime stockbroker, who manipulates the loopholes in the country's archaic banking system to create a massive bull run on the stock exchange. But at a time when the Indian economy was taking its big leap towards liberlisation, it was only a matter of time before Hemant Shah's dream run, ended in a nightmare.