Ek Villain

Starring: Siddharth Malhotra, Shraddha Kapoor, Riteish Deshmukh
Directed by Mohit Suri
Rating: **

In Bollywood we don’t believe in maintaining the purity of a genre. So we copy a thriller (Korean film I Saw The Devil), add to it the tadka of romance, emotions and song-n-dance before ser­ving it up. Thus, we get a clumsy mess of a narrat­ive loop—stories within stories and backstories within back­stories, all leading nowh­ere. Very little in this hodge-podge holds interest except, perhaps, the songs—Galliyan, Awari, Banjara. Yes, there’s a good-­look­ing hero (Siddharth) for us to stare at, but he looks too suave to be a believable goonda. For a man who is irredeemably evil, he har­dly seems to sport any rough edges. Moreover, he merely stares intently at the camera. The bubbly chatterbox of a heroine (Shraddha) feels like a leftover of Sholay’s Basanti, and is irritating to the hilt. Even more so are her diary, Pol­a­roid camera and pinw­h­eel. However, Shr­a­ddha manages to croon well, like her aunt Padm­ini Kolhapure. The villain is yet another variation of the Norman Bates archetype. The gender/misogyny element in the murders remains half-baked. But everything problematic here is still better than the KRK-Remo com­b­ine whose attempt at act­ing can make a stone writhe in pain. Watch it not for thrills but some unintended fun.