Apr 08, 2007 02:40 PM
4997 Views
(Updated Apr 08, 2007 02:41 PM)
.counting the number of seeds in a watermelon.
No, seriously. Vipul Shah's latest offering is mediocre at best. Waqt is a masterpiece when compared to his latest effort. Suresh Nair's script leaves a lot to be desired. The story is mundane, the execution, even more so. At best, a tour of London, a ghastly, one.
Himesh's music is all over the place, with songs popping up for no apparent reason. Very unlike Vipul, and very irritating.
Katrina is plasticky as ever, even a stunning starlet like her doesn't look as glamorous as she did in her earlier movies. Akshay has a truly amazing screen presence, and he's tried to lift the movie as much as possible. Rishi is expressive, vibrant and truly natural. A born actor, you can see that he fits into the role perfectly. Jawed Sheikh lends a sense of calm on screen, which he did to perfection in Shikhar. A brilliant, but underused personality in Indian cinema.
The 2 hour 20 minute saga is really that, a saga that's difficult to endure. There are only two scenes in the entire movie that touched me: The first being Akshay's speech about India's glory(maybe coz I'm an NRI now and really do miss the country a lot) and the climax, where Rishi celebrates Katrina running away from the altar.
Having watched the movie, I realised that Ritesh Deshmukh got no credit for his appearance. Anyone else watching it, please let me know if I'm right or I overlooked it.
Do observe - there are lots of scenes where the camera keeps going on to expressionless close-ups which can get quite annoying. Charlie's role is well characterised, and the brit actor does justice to it. The scene that amazed me was when he goes into buckingham palace and comes out shaking Prince Charles' hand. Getting permissions must have been really difficult.
Both Katrina's and Akshay's characters are very unreal. Not true to life at all. And Upen just ruins the movie. He can't act, he can't speak. His voice in the movie is dubbed, and even the few dialogues that he has are like third-degree torture for your ears.
It is depressing that the London discotheque parts are shot in Aziano, Bombay – they could have at least given us a glimpse of a UK disco, it would’ve given our desi eyes something novel.
The product placements in the movie - spykar, western union and bharatmatrimony are highly ad-like, and don't fit into the script at all.
All in all, it should do well at the box office, but will soon be forgotten by the masses, dismissed as just another movie made to rake in the moolah, which it will do. And unfortunately, more such movies will be funded by this money, and create a vicious circle of trash movies - widening the gap between the brilliance & imaginativeness of hollywood and the ludicrous insipidness of bollywood.
Life would be so much better if such movies were buried deep inside watermelons and not made at all.
