Movie Review: Kahaani

One of the great joys of reviewing films is ending up enjoying one for which you had zero expectations. Sujoy Ghosh’s Kahaani is one such film and it can best be described as an exercise in subverting your expectations. 

Kahaani is an extremely hit-and-miss affair, but it hits more than it misses, and even though its hits are wounded by some unimaginably ludicrous contrivances. The film is engaging despite its over-reliance on typical Bollywood thriller genre conventions, and being a derivative hodge-podge of The Truth about Charlie, Ruby Cairo and Charade. It’s a film that is specially made for folks who like a shocking climax – but it’s not gimmicky and is more of a forthright drama with some misdirection to throw us off track. 

From the opening moments, as a toxic nerve gas from a cage of rats makes its way to a subway train in a metro city, we know we're in for something interesting. The story tries to evoke, with some success, the Hollywood spy films of the 1960s where a stranger wanders into a new town and get embroiled in a conspiracy over the course of a hot summer. The stranger in this case is a heavily pregnant Vidya Bagchi played by Vidya Balan who arrives in Kolkata from London to search for her missing husband.  She seeks help from the local police, and to her horror she fails to find any proof of the existence of her husband. As the rabbit hole goes deeper, the whiff of a government machination and a killer on the loose haunt her life. 

As the story unfolds you begin to realize how the rest of the film is going to play out. The treatment has been done to death in dozens of other thrillers and James Hadley Chase novels, but the ending is quite unexpected and bewildering. In a way, Kahaani is a one-trick pony, but it is a nifty trick. Ghosh directs with a stylish eye and it becomes hard to believe that he made the dreadful Aladin and Home Delivery before this. The pacing of the film is pretty slick and suits the story and the heat that permeates the Kolkata locales.  

Vidya Balan, glowing from her recent turn in The Dirty Picture is once again in fiery form. From the moment she struggles to negotiate with the taxi driver vultures at the airport she holds your attention. This is certainly the most complicated character she has ever played and the best she's performed in any movie. However, it's not just the vulnerability but her blatant versatility and the intangible breakdown of her portrayal into smaller, loosely connected segments that makes her stand out. Parambrata Chatterjee does a good job as a cop but Saswata Chatterjee is even better in his shady role of a contract killer. 

However it is Nawazuddin Siddiqui who is the brightest light in Kahaani – his overarching naturalism is just boggling to the mind. Siddiqui had small roles in Black Friday, Peepli Live, Paan Singh Tomar and here he is just remarkable as a gruff foul mouthed cop. He makes you crave for a movie that stars him along with Irrfan Khan, Vijay Raaz and Deepak Dobriyal in the lead roles.

The bane of Kahaani is its second half, which is replete with cringe inducing contrivances and plot holes the size of West Bengal. On some occasions the film's pace is maimed by a love track that is as unnecessary as it is laughably overblown. Later, Vidya and Parambrata’s characters suddenly behave as if they are in a tawdry Sidney Sheldon novel – they go about picking locks and ransacking offices.

There is a lot of exposition with shoddily staged scenes where characters literally face the camera and explain what is going on. There are even some hysterically bad instances of computer hacking where the film assumes its audience is comprised only of five-year-olds. Then there’s the finale that is unexpected, but so improbable that one would see a cartoon question mark hovering above audience's heads. This is frustrating because all the good work is undone by every such absurdity – and that’s exactly what keeps this from being a truly great film.

Ultimately, Kahaani is a passably assured piece of genre filmmaking that delivers the goods so well packaged that it doesn’t matter that they aren't fresh. There is a lot to like about the film even though the second half pushes the suspension of disbelief to the extreme. It isn't fine art, it is entertainment, and it’s enjoyed best when taken as such. 

(First published in Mumbai Boss)

Movie Review: John Carter

John Carter is a triumph of production design and CGI over plot and character development. The film which cost nearly $300 million is frustrating for the way it simply refuses to entertain. Watching John Carter makes one feel battered and exploited because after the first half hour, it just becomes an unbearable exercise in mediocrity and progressively more terrible 3D.  

Director Andrew Stanton, who has made Pixar classics like A Bug’s Life, Finding Nemo, Wall.E makes an awkward transition to live action cinema, and what we get unfortunately is the worst production he has ever been involved in. Because John Carter is sadly an utter bore and a tiresome experience, and it doesn’t have a shred of the charm of Stanton’s previous films as its self-important sluggishness drones on from one overtly expensive set piece to the next. It just amounts to endless tedium as it slowly drains all signs of life or interest levels from its characters, replacing them with lavish but unattractive computer effects.

The film expires very early on, but it keeps hanging around as it smells prominently fouler with each clichéd plot point. Based on Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burroughs’ book The Princess of Mars, the movie introduces us to John Carter (Taylor Kitsch), a bitter civil war soldier in the 19th century who stumbles upon a device in a cave that teleports him to Mars. On the red planet (which is not much red in this film) Carter gets embroiled in yet another civil war, this time between the human-esque people of Helium and the Zodangans. He also falls for Helium’s princess Dejah (Lynn Collins) who is to be married to Zodangan leader Sab Than (Dominic West) as per the deal between the two kings to end the war. 

Stanton’s regard for gentle sweetness and emotional payoff are part of the many trademarks of his earlier work, but in John Carter his bloated tonal navigations veer so clumsily that we’re left exhausted instead of being thrilled or amused. It doesn’t help that its star Taylor Kitsch, known mostly for his role as Gambit in Wolverine is bland and expressionless. The meandering parts of overstuffed films like the Pirates of the Caribbean sequels become watchable due to its charismatic star, but Kitsch has none of the magnetism to make the proceedings any more interesting that his countenance. 

The villains too are unremarkable – Mark Strong duplicates his otherworldly monotonic cold character from Green Lantern. Without a doubt, the visual effects are grand, and the motion capture detail of the four-handed Tharks is on par with the Na’vis of Avatar. But all of the spectacular CGI is offset by the unspectacular characters, needless exposition and horrible, eyeball stabbing 3D. Disney have suffered more than their share of arid projects, but with this exorbitant mess they appear to have made exactly the disaster they wanted.

Despite a few nifty visual effects, John Carter is rather uninteresting. It fits in the Disney menu except for the fact that it is a dreary dull clutter that completely misses the entertainment mark. Rice Burrows would be twiddling his thumbs in his grave. 

(First published in MiD Day)

Movie Review: The Vow

Dreadfully contrived and syrupy, The Vow plays like a rejected Nicholas Sparks novel sugar-frosted with uneven acting, stereotyped characters, and such an incredibly boring script that it makes brushing your teeth seem more fun. 

Starring Rachel McAdams and teak furniture Channing Tatum, The Vow is an overtly soapy love story full of cringe inducing plot points that unabashedly cater to the lowest-common-denominator audiences.  As per screenwriters Abby Kohn, Marc Silverstein and Jason Katims, the film is based on a true story but it seems too illogical and uninteresting to feel even remotely true or believable. 

Paige (McAdams), an artist and Leo (Channing Tatum), a record studio owner are a young attractive happily married couple in Chicago. Fate takes a beating when a car accident inflicts upon Paige a head injury causing her to lose her memory of the last four years, including her marriage to Leo. She wakes up in the hospital and turns into her former self, an ultra-obedient law student in love with her ex-fiancé (Scott Speedman). Leo fails to come to terms with the fact that Paige thinks of him as a stranger, and to make matters worse, her wealthy estranged parents (Jessica Lange and Sam Neill) turn up and try to separate her from Leo.

The problem is that the film is neither realistic nor a farce – instead it trudges sloppily between both and at most times transcends into the downright ludicrous. Laughably, Leo spends more time telling his friends how much he cares about his wife instead of telling it to his wife. McAdams’ character is a bit like the trio in The Hangover, but instead of a hilarious naked man in a car trunk we get an unintentionally hilarious shirtless Channing Tatum desperately trying to churn out dramatic forlorn facial expressions. Tatum pretty much repeats his one-note character from the equally terrible Dear John while McAdams shows none of the charm that we saw in The Notebook or the recent State of Play. 

Neither Tatum nor McAdams create characters worth caring about or even likable, and we don’t the least bit root for the two to end up together. You can see the clichéd ending coming from a mile away, but the film makes sure it hammers into your head the fact that true love always conquers all. If that weren’t enough, Tatum constantly trails off into irritating pseudo philosophical observational voiceover monologues like ‘moments of impact define who we are’.

A lame excuse of a date movie, The Vow is poorly written, lazily directed and acted and sweet enough to give you motion sickness. If that sounds like something you’d enjoy watching then do catch it as soon as possible.

(First published in MiD Day)

Movie Review: Paan Singh Tomar

In any Bollywood film that chronicles a character which society has wronged, the heroic and the oversentimental are very close cousins, but director Tigmanshu Dhulia is generous enough here to offer us a balanced look at both. Paan Singh Tomar is an unexpected little gem – an engrossing, gently and genuinely observed film whose subject is a fascinating display of empathy. 

As courageous as Shekhar Kapoor’s Bandit Queen in its depiction of Indian societal brutality, Paan Singh Tomar occasionally feels like a made-for-Doordarshan-TV film than a cinematic biopic. But when it does transcend its weepy reliance on melodrama, you're left amazed at the real life protagonist’s stubborn fearlessness in the face of hatred. 

Dhulia, who was a casting director for Bandit Queen has made hit and miss films (Saheb Biwi aur Gangster, Shagird, Haasil) mines the drama assuredly in Paan Singh Tomar  – it’s a searing story of how injustice flattened a young, promising athlete.  Set in Chambal in a post-independence India, the film follows the titular character through his ascension of joining the Indian army and being drafted in the sports team. Tomar wins multiple championships and breaks all sorts of national records despite running barefoot, and his promoters bill him as unstoppable. His heroic career grinds to a halt when he is forced to quit the armed forces and return to his destitute village to settle a family dispute. Things take a turn when his mother is killed and the police refuse to be helpful, and he eventually crosses over to anarchy. 

Paan Singh Tomar is based on a true story but it also works as an allegory of the typical Indian lower class struggle, and it scores points with concrete evidence and instances of the horrible treatment of sportspersons in India. It is true that the film can't avoid the biopic pitfall of fixating on its central character’s personal tragedies to wrench out tears, and by the end it's essentially blaming the Indian system for Tomar’s professional demise. There are the usual lump-in-throat facial shots of Irfan in all his sympathetic glory, and a few scenes cross the boundaries of sentimentality, but at least director Dhulia lends this film an actual heart.

The real meat of the movie comes from Irrfan, who despite his slight demeanor gives a towering performance and shrewdly transforms the contrived into the sublime. He effortlessly puts a human face on the monstrous snarling countenances of Indian antiheroes. He ennobles the character, instead of making him the farcical Hindi hero desperate for the rah-rahs of audiences. And Dhulia deserves credit not just for the simple fact that he made a great movie, but also because he let Irrfan run away with it. 

Of the supporting cast, Mahi Gill as Tomar’s wife, Vipin Sharma as the Army Major and Brijendra Kala as a reporter are swell in their minor roles. Also excellent is Assem Mishra’s intimate camerawork that captures Paan Singh’s dejection and wrath and the sweaty glimpses of lawless India that is too often depicted in Bollywood as a land bereft of humanity.  Paan Singh Tomar was screened at international film circuits two years ago, but was locked away from theatrical release until now. It is fortunate that it has finally arrived because it deserves multiple viewings and all the accolades it can gather.

(First published in MumbaiBoss)