annavetticadgoes2themovies: June 2014

Release date:	June 27, 2014
Director:	Mohit Suri
Cast: Language:	Sidharth Malhotra, Shraddha Kapoor, Riteish Deshmukh, Asif Basra, Kamaal R. Khan (haha, yes it’s true), Shaad Randhawa, Remo Fernandes Hindi

Reports are already in that Ek Villain has had an excellent opening at the box-office today. Can’t blame the audience at all – methinks Sidharth Malhotra’s beautiful face is worth the price of not one, but five tickets. Besides, as a gentleman in the multiplex where I watched this film said rather loudly, “Shraddha Kapoor itni cute hai yaar”.

Both stars fare well in this film, but the most striking performance of the lot comes from the actor armed with the most striking character of the trio: Riteish Deshmukh, who continues to do a great disservice to his talent by persistently starring in crass comedies. He is nowhere close to being as menacing or memorable as Prashant Narayanan’s crazed serial killer in director Mohit Suri’s own neatly executed 2011 crime thriller Murder 2, but Riteish in Ek Villain effectively imbues his character with a tricky mix of diffidence and eccentric evil towards the second half.

The film’s trailers are cleverly misleading. The only thing they confirm is that a serial killer is on the prowl in Mumbai, murdering women in gruesome ways. Sidharth plays a powerful gangster’s hitman called Guru, whose troubling past drove him to the underworld in Goa. Guru is a dangerously violent chap, until he meets and falls in love with the perennially optimistic do-gooder Aisha (Shraddha) who is guarding her own little secret. Enter Rakesh (Riteish), a curiously schizophrenic fellow whose penchant for cruelty is masked by his bland exterior.

If you intend to watch Ek Villain, make sure you are in your seat before it starts – the opening scene is crucial to your experience of the film. That being said, the first half is not particularly engaging, and fails to make the lives of the three lead characters worth emotionally investing in. Once the first murder takes place, it raises expectations of a gripping thriller but instead Mohit Suri deliberately decelerates. In addition, there are virtually back-to-back songs that end up over-stretching the romantic scenes, whereas what this film needed was a brisk pace to match the grim atmosphere that the director achieved at the start. Slow motion sequences and lots of close-ups of Sidharth and Shraddha’s faces are used to remind us how likeable and sweet-looking they are and how in love. Hey, we figured that out pretty quickly. C’mon on now, move on!

It is Ek Villain’s good fortune that the second half is the better half of the film. In particular through the entire flashback that takes us back to that first murder, I found myself suddenly involved in the lives of Guru, Aisha and Rakesh, and unexpectedly discovering tears in my eyes. Oh that phone call from a woman who doesn’t know she’s about to die! And that plea she makes for the reason why she wants to live! Both really got me.

There are rumours floating around that Ek Villain is a copy of a Korean film. I’ve not seen the reported original so I can’t confirm the allegation. Once trust is broken though, it’s hard to restore, and I can’t help but remember a long interview I did with Mohit for my book The Adventures Of An Intrepid Film Critic during which he insisted that Murder 2 is NOT a copy of the South Korean film The Chaser although I’d told him upfront that I’d seen the original and agree with the accusation. I ultimately didn’t mention this part of our discussion in The Adventures… since it was not relevant to the theme of the book, but my point is, this is a talented film maker who owes it to himself to win the trust of viewers to whom integrity matters.

We’ve already discussed Riteish’s performance in Ek Villain. Two supporting cast members merit a mention: the lovely Asif Basra as Aisha’s dad, and the child actor playing Rakesh’s kid. The director also effectively harnesses Kamaal R. Khan’s creepy off-screen aura here for his role as a wife-beating misogynist. Once she gets past her initial self-conscious cutesiness in the film, Shraddha shows the same acting chops that were evident in both Luv Ka The End – her first film as a leading lady – and last year’s runaway hit Aashiqui 2 which was also directed by Mohit. Let’s forget the poor kid was in that non-film Teen Patti. Aisha’s encounter with Rakesh could easily have been over-done, but in Shraddha’s eyes we get genuine pain, not melodrama. Unfortunately for her, people like Aisha are a Bollywood cliche, bubbly, ever-smiling, determined not to focus on the personal tragedy behind the façade and sometimes – as in this case – boringly flawless. She also spouts some cheesy philosophical lines. Sidharth, for his part, has a wonderfully sensitive face. In a career spanning just three films (this included), we’ve already seen those eyes tellingly convey hurt, love, affection, amusement and anger. What they haven’t managed yet though is to cross the line from anger to murderous fury, the kind of fury that we’re told Guru feels before he meets Aisha, though we don’t see it in Sidharth’s face.

This is a minor problem compared to the film’s lackadaisical pre-interval pace and use of music. Post-interval though, the songs are more intelligently deployed: a surprisingly soft nightclub number featuring Prachi Desai matches the brooding mood of the film at that point, a contrast to the jaunty – sometimes incongruous – insertions that club songs usually are in Bollywood; the song accompanying the closing credits (Galiyaan, which is the pick of the pleasant-though-not-compelling soundtrack) actually takes forward the poignancy of the story, instead of being one of those standard peppy numbers totally disconnected from the goings-on preceding the rolls.

Apart from a more consistent pace, Ek Villain also needed more detailing and more depth in its characterisation. As an American crime and legal teleserial junkie, I found myself longing for the writers of Criminal Minds and Law and Order: Criminal Intent to have a go at the profiles of both Guru and Rakesh. They’re interesting men who could have been so much more. Without that depth, Ek Villain is a reasonably entertaining but forgettable film.

Rating (out of five stars): **1/4 stars

CBFC Rating (India):	U/A
Running time:	130 minutes

Poster courtesy: https://www.facebook.com/ekvillain

Release date:	June 20, 2014
Director:	Sajid Khan
Cast: Language:	Saif Ali Khan, Riteish Deshmukh, Ram Kapoor, Bipasha Basu, Tamannaah Bhatia, Esha Gupta, Satish Shah, Chunkey Pandey, Darshan Zariwala Hindi

1. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

2. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

3. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

4. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

5. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

6. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

7. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

8. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

9. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

10. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

11. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

12. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

13. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

14. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

15. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

16. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

17. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

18. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

19. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

20. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

21. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

22. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

23. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

24. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

25. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

26. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

27. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

28. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

29. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

30. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

31. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

32. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

33. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

34. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

35. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

36. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

37. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

38. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

39. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

40. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

41. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

42. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

43. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

44. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

45. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

46. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

47. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

48. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

49. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

50. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

Remember how some schoolteachers would punish us for our mischief by making us write a sentence 10 / 50 / 100 times on a blackboard or in a notebook? Well, this is me punishing myself for being an incorrigible optimist in my self-inflicted job as a film critic.

Humshakals is as flat as cola from a bottle that’s been left open for a year. Read that clearly please: I didn’t say one day, or one month, or six months, but an entire year. The problem is not that it’s asinine (hey, asinine can sometimes be enjoyable!), but that it’s desperate – desperate to be hilarious, desperately imitative, desperate to hide the desperation of a team of writers (director Sajid Khan himself, Robin Bhatt and Akarsh Khurana) who have clearly run out of ideas.

This inexplicable mish-mash of Sajid’s own earlier films and other projects features a London-based billionaire Indian businessman called Ashok Singhania (Saif Ali Khan) who does terrible stand-up comedy as a hobby, his best friend and business associate Kumar (Riteish Deshmukh) and Ashok’s scheming uncle Kunwar Amar Nath Singh, the initials of whose name gives us the acronym Kans. This modern-day avatar of Lord Krishna’s evil uncle is played by Ram Kapoor. Kans Maama’s effort to cheat Ashok out of his empire is kneaded into a mix that includes two patients in a mental asylum who happen to be Ashok and Kumar’s look-alikes and namesakes, plus two gay men called Chinku and Pinku who undergo plastic surgery to look like Ashok and Kumar, in addition to two doppelgangers of Kans, one called Johnny who is an inmate of a home for the criminally insane and the other a Punjabi nightclub owner known as Balbir. Get that? Three Saifs, three Riteishes and three Rams.

The only Sajid Khan film in which a heroine mattered somewhat was Heyy Babyy starring Vidya Balan. That was seven years back. Since then all his films have featured women as mere showpieces who make brief appearances to wear sexy clothing, dance with the boys and fall for them. This film gives its ladies even shorter shrift – and possibly shorter skirts – than Housefull, Housefull 2 and Himmatwala did. And so Bipasha Basu in tiny tight outfits plays Ashok’s employee and Kumar’s girlfriend Mishti, Tamannaah Bhatia in tiny tight outfits is a reality show host and Ashok’s lady love Shania, and Esha Gupta in tiny tight outfits plays Dr Shivani Gupta who Ashok’s mentally ill lookalike is in love with. Whew! Never mind about the others, but it really feels sad to see a female star of Bipasha’s standing reduced to a curio with just a handful of lines in a film.

Someone should have told Team Humshakals that writing comedy – even slapstick comedy – requires imagination and intelligence; that the world’s best comedians require solid writing to back them. Saif and Riteish are comic aces on a good day but are remarkably unremarkable throughout this film. As for a fine actor like Ram… did someone tell him that commercial comedy is compulsorily shallow, low-IQ stuff?

Here is a representative sample of this tepid film’s terrible un-funniness: At one point, Kans Maama is trying to have sex with his lookalike who is dressed in drag. Meaning: the very large Ram Kapoor dressed as a woman… Aiyyoooo! When Kans pushes the reluctant ‘woman’ down on a bed, it breaks. She says with triumphant relief: Look, we can’t do anything since the bistar is broken! The man replies: But you are a bistar yourself. “Main bistar nahin, sister hoon,” she retorts. “Aur main sinister hoon,” says he, as he unbuttons himself. Huh? Meaning whaaaattt?

Of course this silly film features racial and other stereotypes much loved by Bollywood, all filled out by marginal characters in brief appearances: two small-sized men who are addressed as “Thapa (because of the shape of his eyes) aur uske Papa”, two gay men who are – but of course – effeminate and sexually obsessed, a Christian man called Albert who – but of course – is a drunk, and a chap called Srinivasan who speaks Hindi with Bollywood’s idea of a ‘Madrasi’ accent. There are jokes involving people in comas, those with serious disabilities, and pretty much anyone who is dealing with misfortune. Political incorrectness can be so much fun when it’s cleverly done. In the hands of talentless writers, it can be hurtful and offensive. Humshakals is neither of the above. It’s so bland, so loosely handled, so repetitive and so boring, that I wasn’t even offended.

The only genuinely amusing part of Humshakals is the fact that Sajid recycles tropes from his earlier films in an audaciously transparent fashion here. Was he assuming that we have poor memories? If Housefull had the song Papa jag jayega sung late at night in a castle by two young couples even as they tried to evade the sleepwalking father of one of the girls, Humshakals has Barbaad raat sung by two young couples in a castle late at night while a middle-aged mental asylum warden skulks around the building. Kumar even mouths a ‘joke’ that’s been used and re-used umpteen times elsewhere: Hamara bad luck kharaab chal rahaa hai. Uff! And then there’s the fact that the climax of Housefull was set in a British palace among a crowd of white-skinned foreigners, while the climax of Humshakals is set in the British House of Commons in the midst of – c’mon guess! – a crowd of white-skinned foreigners including Prince Charles!

Juvenility, you see, is not Humshakals’ only crime. Insipidity and lack of originality are its primary problems. What else does one say of a non-kids-film in which one of the ‘jokes’ is this name of a mental asylum in the UK: Lord Cray G. Mental Asylum. Double uff!

Before you assume that I’m being unnecessarily “intellectual” in my response to a deliberately mindless film, let me give you an idea of my minimal expectations from such comedies: unlike most of my fellow film critics, I actually had quite a bit of fun watching Housefull. Housefull 2 was offensive though. And Himmatwala was an unqualified disaster.

The best thing I can say about Humshakals is that it’s marginally better than Himmatwala.