|
Release
date:
|
October 13, 2017
|
|
Director:
|
Sattwik Mohanty
|
|
Cast:
Language:
|
Taaha Shah, Himansh Kohli, Soundarya Sharma, Jimmy Sheirgill, Satish
Kaushik, Pitobash Tripathy, Anupam Kher
Hindi
|
Ranchi
Diaries is meant
to be a comic tribute to Ocean’s Eleven,
with a bunch of quirky characters who get involved in a bank heist gone wrong.
Writer-director Sattwik Mohanty seems to have a sense of humour that he might
put to good use some day when he decides to write a proper screenplay rather
than this lazily handled assemblage of scenes. I don’t know what it took to
rope Jimmy Sheirgill and young Taaha Shah into this project. Maybe it did not
take much convincing because these two talented artistes have been struggling
long enough to get projects worthy of them.
Sheirgill made his debut in
Gulzar’s Maachis back in 1996 and has
since been seen in a whole host of films, though only a handful have been
deserving of his naturally likeable personality and acting skills. Taaha Shah
made his debut in Y-Films’ Luv Ka The End
co-starring Shraddha Kapoor in 2011 and has since then hung around on the
margins of the industry. He is a good-looking kid with a screen presence, stuck
– like his senior Sheirgill – in this meandering mess that aspires to be a
film.
The activity here is set in
Jagarnathpur in Ranchi where Manish Pandey (played by Himansh Kohli) is a safe breaker waiting for his big break before
he can run away with his girlfriend, the ambitious wannabe popstar Guddiyaa
Sharma (Soundarya Sharma). Unfortunately for her, she has caught the eye of the
local gangster Thakur Ranjhe Pratap Singh (a decidedly uninvolved Anupam Kher
in a role that amounts to a guest appearance). Thakur Bhaiyya, as he is
popularly known, spends his time leering at her Youtube videos. The only way
Guddiyaa can make a career for herself or escape this elderly creep is to run
away from that town.
Shah is Pinku, a local hooligan.
Sheirgill plays senior cop Lallan Singh. Satish Kaushik is sub-inspector S.N.
Chaubey whose most memorable scene involves him farting because he ate too much
at a party. And Pitobash, who was so fabulous in 2011’s Shor In The City directed by Raj Nidimoru and Krishna DK, is wasted
here as a Naxal leader with hardly any screen time or lines.
So ya, there is a bank robbery,
there are Naxals and there is some tomfoolery going on. At first the accents
are funny, as is the stupidity of this entire clueless gang. Soon after the
opening scenes though, it becomes apparent that Mohanty is as clueless as his
characters and does not know how to proceed further with his concept. So Ranchi Diaries flails its arms about
while the editor falls off to sleep on the job and the hapless cast does
whatever they can in this whatever-you-wanna-call-it.
Guddiyaa is the brains behind the
bank robbery in Ranchi Diaries
because, well you know, as the overbearing voiceover tells us: “Har bawaal ke peechhe ek aurat ka haath hai.”
(Rough, not literal, translation: behind every major problem, there is a
woman.) In a less pointless project, I may have taken the time to join issue
with that kind of backward language, but Ranchi
Diaries is not even worthy of being argued with. The nicest thing about it
is that it is just over one-and-a-half-hours long. Ideally, it should have been
a 10-minute short with the song Godfather
– which too deserved to be in a better venture – playing in the background.
Kabhi kabhi mere dil mein khayal aata hai, ki yeh film na bani
hoti toh mujhe aaj subah dedh ghante zyaada sone ko milte. To be fair, Ranchi Diaries is not repulsive or
puke-worthy or anything of that sort. It is just one of those thingies that
makes you want to ask: why did anyone bother to make this? Seriously, why?
Rating
(out of five stars): 0 stars
|
CBFC Rating (India):
|
UA
|
|
Running time:
|
97 minutes
|
This
review has also been published on Firstpost:
No comments:
Post a Comment