Revisiting ‘Sadak’: What made Sanjay Dutt’s and Pooja Bhatt’s film a 90s' blockbuster

By Vandana Srivastawa

on August 26, 2020

Sanjay Dutt’s and Pooja Bhatt’s Sadak was one of the highest-grossing films of 1991. The film is synonymous with some amazingly melodious romantic songs that are still popular today. The film was inspired by the 1976 American film Taxi Driver and was remade in Tamil as Appu. Besides, Sanjay and Pooja, the film also starred Sadashiv Amrapurkar, Deepak Tijori, Niilima Azeem, Pankaj Dheer and Avtar Gill. It boasted of impeccable performances, a taut storyline and romantic music by Nadeem-Shravan. Amrapurkar’s villainous avatar not only earned him a Filmfare Award for the Best Villain but made the film body to institute the category for the first time.

Sadak was a romantic-thriller where Sanjay played a taxi driver called Ravi and Pooja plays a prostitute in the clutches of the evil transgender brothel owner Amrapurkar called Maharani. Ravi meets Pooja before she is sold to Maharani. He encounters her again when she tries to flee the brothel and falls in love with her. However, the road to happiness is not easy and has lots of pitfalls.

Ravi is haunted by his sister (Soni Razdan’s) suicide as she was pushed into the sex industry by her lover. He is hell-bent on rescuing Pooja from the evil sex industry and mortgages his taxi to ensure that he books her for every night before she is sold to a customer. However, his plans go awry as Maharani guesses his real agenda. In the climax, Ravi manages to kill Maharani but is jailed for taking the law in his hands. Upon his release he is reunited with Pooja.

Sadak had everything from romance to action to drama to melodious music. The film ruled the roost in the 90s and continues to be a cult today as well.

Sadak 2 is a sequel to the previous hit and stars Sanjay, Pooja, Alia Bhatt, Gulshan Grover, Jisshu Sengupta, Makarand Deshpande, Priyanka Bose, Mohan Kapoor, Akshay Anand and Aditya Roy Kapur. It is directed by Mahesh Bhatt. It would be interesting to see how Sadak 2 manages to take the story forward and with what twists, turns and speedbrakers. Sadak 2 is all set to release on Disney+Hotstar on August 28.