When the heist goes terribly wrong, the gangsters suspect a mole within their midst. Who else could have alerted the police about their robbery but a cop masquerading as a criminal? The newest member of the posse comes under suspicion. But the expectation that the jig is up makes all the gangsters turn on each other. This denouement concludes Sanjay Gupta's Kaante (2002), an unabashed re-creation of Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs (1992), which closes with the familiar Mexican stand-off as well. Although there are some differences between them, Gupta's is clearly a replication of Tarantino's film. We might even think of Kaante as a good example of what Thomas Leitch calls a ‘true’ remake, as it reproduces its source so closely that it both invokes and disowns it completely. One might argue that Kaante imitates Reservoir Dogs too well, seeking ‘to annihilate the model’ by ‘eliminat[ing] any need or desire to see the film [it] seek[s] to replace’ (Leitch 2002: 50). In the process, Kaante establishes Bollywood on the global screen by replicating and then outdoing Reservoir Dogs in Los Angeles itself.

But to truly understand the relationship between Kaante and Reservoir Dogs, we must first acknowledge that Gupta's twice-told tale is actually a thrice-told tale, because, as is now well known, Tarantino's film is itself a mostly true remake of Ringo Lam's City on Fire (1987), which ends with a similar Mexican stand-off. Both Tarantino and Gupta have engaged overtly in the kind of avowal and disavowal that Leitch considers central to true remakes. When asked about its source text, Gupta does not deny Tarantino's influence, but then swiftly undercuts that claim by arguing that Kaante is ‘in the genre of films like Reservoir Dogs, The Asphalt Jungle, The Killing, City on Fire … [and] not a remake of any one film’ (quoted in Desser 2005: 221). Gupta, however, does not fail to remind us that Reservoir Dogs is itself a remake of City on Fire. Ironically, early reviewers of Tarantino's film didn't immediately notice that connection. When asked later by his biographer about Lam's influence, Tarantino admits his admiration for City on Fire, even acknowledges that ‘it's a great movie’, but then undermines that singular inspiration by professing a penchant for ‘steal[ing] from every single movie ever made’ (quoted in Dawson 1995: 91).