Pita-ah-ooh-ouch!!!. Review on Pitaah

When Manjrekar saw A Time To Kill, he immediately worked on a plot to kill that brilliant story & succeeded.

To see how much downhill, Manjrekar has slided, check this.

The original: A Time to Kill is about a black father who kills the boys who rape and spit on his child, leaving her to die. The story, set in a white county, has a white lawyer erasing the colour prejudice with his power of argument.

The duplicate: A bonded labourer has his child raped by the Thakur's inebriated sons. The law doesn't help him, and even when the child identifies the culprits, they have a mujra happening in the cophouse for them (sic!).

The bonded labourer kills them, naturally, but then the law and Thakur get behind him. He tries to commit suicide with the family but it doesn't work. The story ends with the Thakur's death.

Now, that we have seen Manjrekar's attempt at making a good film into a pathetic one, let us further analyse his version.

Nandita Das dishes out a good performance. Sanjay Dutt tries hard at his character. But he hardly speaks and even when he does, he mouths good Hindi. Considering that the cop Jackie Shroff speaks Bhojpuri, this is inconvincing. And Mr Manjrekar, could you not have got the man to wear original dhotis instead of getting him obviously readymade ones?

But then the director has managed to get out some convincing emotional scenes out of the cast. If only, he had dished out a better story, and either concentrated on making the film realistic or commercial and not a bhelpuri of both, it would have worked.

Pitaah is certainly not a film a pitaah would watch with family, and definitely not one the front-benchers would love either. A sad film for the man behind Vaastav. May be, it is time this man did a quality analysis of his products. Else, soon he will be an erstwhile director.