A reasonably interesting story led down by bad acting and direction
I don’t know how this film got national award that year. Were the other movies in Telugu worse than this or just because it had a national message it was selected? The entire movie lacked coherence, scenes were misplaced and acting was elementary like a school project. It felt like how I felt when I watched ‘4 students’, after it become a sensation in Malayalam film industry. These were topics which were beaten to death in Tamil cinema and even if otherwise it wasn’t made interestingly.
The film opens with an interesting shootout scene between the mafia landlord Irfan Khan (Pavan Malhotra) and police. Somehow the setting got me reminded of ‘Sarfarosh’, may be because of the time period of the film and the way it looked. As Irfan’s brother dies in the shootout, he plans for a revenge of him and tries to escape after forty days. The plan looks decent when he says but it remains a question of how it’ll be executed because he asks for four boys outside his gang so that no one would get any doubts. Parallelly we get to know the story of four boys and a girl who have some or the other problems. A typical lazy writing with characters which would come to mind immediately when you think of hijacking.
We get to know of these characters one by one on how they struggle for money but it still remains curious as to how they’d be able to pull such a big act. Meanwhile we get a song where they all dance in rain, one of the fathers who needs dialysis and other regular template scenes. The motivation to do such big crime is not inspiring. But only during interval we get to know that they indeed were not trying to do the crime. Instead they kidnap him so that they could get fifty lakhs from government.
The very twist was silly. But I guess where it went wrong is, the director didn’t have idea whether to make it a sarcastic or a serious film post that. As impossible it might be to just escape with a king of mafia. At least post that it could have been something passionate like how people get kidnapped in ‘Samurai’ or be a fun film where they don’t know what to do with him.
Of course, they don’t know what to do with him. One of them says out the name, one of them goes without mask and all these scenes which you write when you’re given a compulsory homework, appears on screen. The humor too doesn’t work. Their amateurish nature only irritates as to why they’d be doing such an act. On top of it, the acting of Pavan Malhotra was over the top. He didn’t have the charm of a gang leader. If it had to be made in as funny psycho kind of way, cue could have been taken from Paresh Rawal’s character in ‘Kshana Kshanam’. Because there is one specific scene towards the climax where he’d be shooing off a monitor lizard when his men appear. Those are the scene which should have induced genuine laughs but bad acting spoils that too.
After everything, the way all decide not to take the money and how it returns back to them again didn’t work at all. It was done in a more fun way in a not so famous movie called ‘Pudhayal’ where even though it was not meant to be taken seriously, worked as a great fun film. Here I was flabbergasted with the intention.
constantscribbles 