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.
