When Salim-Javed sued the makers of the new Zanjeer, they might have been officially demanding royalty but the sub-text was very evident: Stop raping our work. Because bad remakes are like bad hangovers –– they spoil the new day and also stain the memories of the happy night. Like RGV set aag to Sholay.

Yes, it’s been 40 years since Amitabh Bachchan finally broke through with his 13th film, but Prakash Mehra’s Zanjeer has aged well and is still fresh in our consciousness. That angry young man, that intense glare, that crackling dialogue delivery... still manages to produce gooseflesh aplenty.

Why then do we have to watch Ram Charan play the film history-bending Inspector Vijay and hear him say those iconic lines? [Apparently it’s not even his own voice.] You maybe a superstar in Telugu cinema and the son of Chiranjeevi (a tilt down from his poster introduces the beta) but you do not mess with our collective movie history.

Director Apoorva Lakhia, who has never been into originals anyway (he who copy-pasted Man on Fire into Ek Ajnabee), also takes credit in “adapting” (along with Suresh Nair) Zanjeer 1973. But if you haven’t even changed the names of the characters, if you haven’t even juggled around the song sequences, if you haven’t even tweaked the dialogues, what have you adapted? Oh that humdrum jabber about oil trafficking!

It’s the same story –– Salim-Javed were inspired from the Spaghetti Western Death Rides a Horse –– about a boy watching his parents being killed. In the old Zanjeer the kid had just seen the killer’s chain with a miniature horse hanging from it, here he gets to see the horse-shaped tattoo on the killer’s hand. And Vijay keeps getting horse nightmares all his life. If you take the audience’s nightmare into account, it’s like a nightmare within a nightmare. Pure Nolan turf!

And Ram Charan makes sure that you get into deeper and deeper levels of nightmare. For you to even vaguely understand what emotion he is trying to convey, you have to bank on the tone of the background music. Because the face maintains the same constipated look whether he is sad, whether he is shocked, whether he is romancing, whether he is dancing. He is good with the action set-pieces though.

In the original, there was Mala the chakku-chhuri tez karanewaali. Here is Mala the NRI –– Priyanka Chopra making use of her ‘exotic’ accent –– who strangely dances to a song called Pinky hai paise waalon ki at a Facebook friend’s wedding and then wears I Love Mumbai Police tees. And because she keeps flaunting the “Daddy’s lil girl” tattoo on her hand, there are scenes featuring a father on the phone. How bizarre!

There’s Sher Khan, of course. The character of the foe-turned-friend Pathan that remains to date Pran’s most famous screen avatar. Here he is Sanjay Dutt with peculiar flesh distribution on his face making him look like Sin City’s Mickey Rourke. And strangely he is dubbed by someone else for just the last scene. Oh yes, he must have been in jail by then.

And Teja is played by Prakash Raj with the kind of loud aplomb he brings to these big Bolly baddie roles. He doesn’t ape Ajit –– in fact he watches Loin’s scene from the original Zanjeer on DVD –– and gives the character its own funny quirks. His Mona Darling is Mahie Gill, who always appears to be just out of or getting into an orgasm. Meow!

To connect the episodes there are time lapses of the Mumbai skyline every five minutes and grainy handycammed stock shots of festivals. The songs (by Anand Raj Anand, Chirantan Bhatt and Meet Bros Anjjan) are very ho-hum and just keep adding to the agony.

So many petitions happen these days. From saving tigers to banning fairness creams. Can’t there be one to save our classic movies? Why can’t these remakes be banned? Don’t we the fans have greater rights to the original than the producers? Can’t we just kick these crimes away and say: Yeh hamare yaadein hai, tumhaare baap ka maal nahin!