Ooooops!. Review on Ra One

Ladies & gentlemen, the wait is finally over. SRK's most prestigious project RA-ONE has been released as scheduled during diwali holidays. The film that was marketed in stages like SRK's looks revealed, then SRK's another looks with curly hair revealed, Rajnikant included in a small role, Arjun Rampal's looks revealed, Mr. Bachchan to render his voice to add flavour to the film, etc. which increased the curiosity of some of the viewers.

Everything about the film has been projected as larger than life stuff, which raised the bar of expectations sky high & with that the magnitude of the risk of disappointments moved in ascending direction should the movie fail to live up to the hype generated by media / makers / SRK's fans.

What is the film about?

SRK is a loser instead of a super hero for his son Armaan Verma. SRK with the help of Tom Wu makes a video game that has a powerful villain who is not easy to defeat. The day the game is launched, Tom WU finds it difficult to beat the villain RA-ONE where as Armaan plays the game & gives a tough fight to RA-ONE.

Now RA-ONE wants to kill Armaan & comes out to the real world from the virtual world and kills SRK. Armaan bring the hero from the video game G-ONE from the virtual world to real world to fight RA-ONE.

Who will win the game? RA-ONE or G-ONE?

How original is the film?

In the year 1991, James Cameron made the sequel to mid-eighties blockbuster Terminator called TERMINATOR-2 - JUDGEMNENT DAY, where a powerful terminator T-1000 is sent to kill the son of Linda Hamilton & Arnold playing a less powerful terminator T-800 is trying to save the son.

So here T-800 is G-ONE, T-1000 is RA-ONE, Kareena Kapoor is Linda Hamilton while Armaan is the son, who is in danger.

Analysis

There is nothing wrong to get inspired by some product & then attempt to produce your own counter product but it MUST have the quality that the original had & to make that happen a foolproof script is required, which was missing in RA-ONE.

Here the idea of bringing the villain to kill & hero to protect from the virtual world to real world sounded good on paper but due to the lackluster screenplay the film falls to an all time low.

Romance has been SRK's strength that made him popular & most of the time when he tried to do something different, he has fallen flat. So the writers (4 of them) have tried to add some unwanted scenes between the hero of virtual world & the heroine of real world, which only obstruct the film from moving ahead & when strength becomes weakness, defeat is imminent. The result is no different here too.

There are few scenes that are there to make you laugh but they fail to bring even a smile on your face because they end up being vulgar or making joke of a community & moreover they look forced rather than required.

Special effects which are said to be of superior quality in RA-ONE unfortunately fall below the expectations because you expected a lot more before entering te theater. Thanks to the marketing. There are very few such scenes & glimpses of almost everything is shown in promos of the film of what ever is there to be seen in the name of special effects. Except the train colliding with CST. So as far as special effects are concerned ROBOT & BLUE still stands tall as films with superior quality special effects. RA-ONE is no match to either of them.

Looks like I have become deaf because I could not understand majority of the words of the songs, though two of them had foot tapping music but they are not of the standards set by SRK himself, which cannot be beaten by pelvic thrusts in the name of dance & good looking sets.

Dialogues are pretty ordinary but you can't miss the hard hitting one coming from Arjun Rampal - "tum raavan ko kar saal maartey ho, kyunki woh kabi mar nahin sakta". Well written

Performances & Direction

As a producer SRK did try to do his best but only in the field of marketing. Had he have given a thought to scrutinize the department responsible for writing the story & screenplay, the outcome would have been different.

Any producer when assigns a job to someone to direct his films, trusts him fully and has immense faith in him that the job will be well done. But looks like SRK did not check the track record of Anubhav Sinha because almost all his films DUS, CASH, TATHASTU, etc though were visual delight but did fall short when it came to the story & execution of the material was concerned. RA-ONE is no exception, it has met the similar fate.

Armaan Verma is a good find & makes a comfortable debut. Kareena Kapoor looked ravishing & does her part well. Dalip Tahil overacts.

Tom Wu as SRK's colleague was ok & passable as the RA-ONE who is out to kill Armaan but why did he maintained constipated looks when he becomes the killer is yet to be known.

Arjun Rampal as RA-ONE is extremely likable. In fact his is the only character that brings some life to the film but unfortunately he is hardly there for 30 minutes.

SRK is just plain OK., which is a surprise. Considering this to be his home production why did he prefer to have such a character. May be he thought he can do wonders like Arnold did in Terminator but then the latter had a rock solid script to support him, which was against the former in RA-ONE.

Final Outcome

Even some of SRK's die hard fans have agreed that the film has not lived up to the expectations but few still think that it is a good film & so does the makers. But can two wrongs make one right? Wait for few months to watch the film on TV to finds the answer.