Utterly illogical and nonsensical. Review on Alag

Words fail me. How Bollywood continually manages not to grasp the basic techniques of story-telling is really beyond me. Suspension of belief is one thing, deluding yourself that your audience is stupid enough to agree with whatever you choose to portray in your pathetic excuse for a movie is quite another. A good author succeeds by building and nurturing a bond of mutual respect with the reader, by assuming that the reader is intelligent and giving him credit for it by making an effort to make his story sound as plausible as he can. If the reader is able to pick holes in the story as easily as a hungry mouse ravishing its evening meal, the author simply didn’t try hard enough.

Alag tries to tell a story of a man, Tejas Rastogi (Akshay Kapoor), upon who, we are helpfully informed, Eeshwar has just decided to bestow a few powers. What? Comic book characters like Spiderman and Superman had some attempts at reasons for their powers (and this was some forty years ago), and all these guys could come up with was that? I wonder what would have happened if Peter Parker had said Jesus appeared to him in a dream and made him Spiderman. Maybe this is why Bollywood is not in the comic-book business.

All right, let’s stop whining about that little thing and try to focus on what exactly it is that Tejas can do. Quite a lot, as it turns out. His primary area of expertise seems to be electricity, by virtue of which he can handle large doses of electric current. Using his electrical powers, he can also make spoons stick together by just looking at them and nodding with a smile on his face, cause electronic equipment around him to stop working, and raise people out of their comas after reading their minds. What have all these got to do with electricity? Go figure. And if you think he sounds disturbingly like Uri Geller then it is purely your opinion. I am not making any such suggestion.

There is one more thing Tejas can do, or can’t do rather, which forms the basis for the whole tale. Notwithstanding his name, he cannot bear to see bright light. He is also completely hairless with a bald head and fully shaven eye brows, though his eye-lashes have somehow miraculously escaped punishment. His father, being the educated worldly man that he is, decides to put his son away locked in the basement for eighteen years. During all those times when Tejas cries saying he wants to see the world, all his old man does is to cry with him; not once does it occur to him there are such things as shades and contact lenses in this world. Soon after his death, in walks Purva (Dia Mirza) and whisks him away to their centre, giving him shades first, and then contact lenses. Talk about common sense.

If you are thinking you have seen the last of Tejas’s powers, think again, because he is also a genius. He has spent eighteen years in his basement just reading books, so he knows everything about everything, especially how far each planet is away from the Sun. So needless to say, he is rejected by his peers because he looks funny, and he is rejected by his teachers because he rubs it in their face that he is smarter than them. The only person who does not shun him is, of course, Purva, with whom Tejas develops a loving friendship. In fact, he loves her so much that smack in the middle of the first half, he decides to transport himself to an imaginary song with a lot of dancing and a full head of hair. I believe the song goes something like ‘Do you feel the passion in my heart?’ which is so far removed from the character Tejas is supposed to be playing that I nearly choked with laughter. But boy, this guy can dance.

Anyway, the next hour or so is just like any other high-school drama where the school bully takes every opportunity to – well, bully the new kid. What surprised me was the persistence John (the bully) seemed to have been blessed with. I have no experience in these things, but if I was a bully and the guy I was trying to tease electrocutes a man with one hand while simultaneously healing a pigeon with another, I would keep my distance. But hey, that’s me. John on the other hand simply wouldn’t let go of Tejas until one day a prank goes too far and John accidentally dies of – surprise – electrocution.

This obviously crushes Tejas to such an extent that he decides to leave the centre but having heard about his exploits with the pigeon, Purva’s father decides to give Tejas a go at healing his wife, who has been in a coma for a while now after an accident. And of course, Tejas wakes her up just by putting his hand on her forehead and making it glow. What’s more, he even reads her mind and tells the father and daughter exactly how the accident occurred. At about the same time, he also makes peace with his peers from the centre and decides to go back. In fact, he does.

This is when Dr Richard Dyer enters the equation with some babble about studying Tejas’s brain to cure Parkinsons, which is weird because Tejas doesn’t have Parkinsons. The good doctor has already killed a bunch of people in his secret lab and is ready to use Tejas for that too. What happens then? Is Tejas going to give in to Dr Dyer’s evil plan? Or is he going to retaliate? After he kills Dr Dyer (oops, did I give that away?), does he live on in the outside world or does something happen that prompts him to go back to his basement? Isn’t the tension simply killing you?

Through the course of the movie you cannot but help feeling sorry for the actors because none of the characters have any kind of depth. Akshay Kapoor does surprisingly well and judging by his Samson-like build and dancing talent, we should be seeing more of him in the future in hopefully better films. Dia Mirza is strictly functional as are the other bells and whistles. But you can see them struggling with the shoddy story and script. None of them seem to have any idea of what their character is about, and I don’t blame them.

The crew seems to have done a largely good job apart from the misplaced song which was clearly meant showcase some of Akshay’s talents. Direction was unnoticeable, photography was decent and most sets were believable. Music was adequate with no noticeably catchy songs. Unfortunately, the story turned out to be a real downer; such a disaster, in fact, that the final song featuring some Bollywood big shots does little to salvage anything.

In a nutshell, unless you have an uncontrollable urge to subject yourself to some mind-numbing torture, give this one a miss.