REVIEW 292: DESI KATTEY

Release date:	September 26, 2014
Director:	Anand Kumar
Cast: Language:	Jay Bhanushali, Akhil Kapur, Ashutosh Rana, Suneil Shetty, Tia Bajpai, Sasha Agha Hindi

Desi Kattey is the most unwittingly amusing film to emerge from Bollywood this year. Director Anand Kumar – who earlier made Delhii Heights (starring Neha Dhupia and Jimmy Sheirgill) and Zila Ghaziabad (with Sanjay Dutt, Viveik Oberoi and Arshad Warsi) – has come up with a film that’s a mish-mash of various themes explored by Bollywood over the years.

The opening credits suggest that Suneil Shetty and Ashutosh Rana are the film’s leading men. As if the thought of watching approximately two-and-a-half hours of Shetty-anna on screen is not intimidating enough, comes the realisation that the truth is even worse. In reality, Shetty and Rana play supporting characters. Desi Kattey’s actual heroes are TV’s Jay Bhanushali about whom we will speak later, and debutant Akhil Kapur who does the most comical take on “intense” we’ve seen in Bollywood in recent years.

Kapur glares. He glowers. He lowers his head and looks around menacingly. He dips his voice to do a poor imitation of a baritone. He does a drunken rant that’s so bad, it’s good. And when he looks lovingly at his girlfriend/wife, it appears like he’s leering more than Prem Chopra, Sadashiv Amrapurkar and Ranjeet rolled in one. Media reports will tell you he is the nephew of veteran Vinod Khanna. After watching the film I googled him and discovered from an interview that he thinks he was “in Tony Montana mode from Scarface” throughout this film. Umm. I can visualise Al Pacino watching Desi Kattey and voluntarily entering a grave just so that he could turn in it in protest. I, for one, fell off my chair laughing at the reference. Picked myself up off the floor to write this review.

Perhaps, just perhaps, this young actor will be better with better guidance in a better-written film. This one’s too cliched for anyone’s good, even while failing miserably in its attempt to be a Ram Gopal Varma film. At first it seems like it is about inseparable friends who are like brothers, the legendary Hindi film chaddi buddies, orphans who become hoodlums. Oh boy, how many of those have we seen! In this thread, two child actors grow up to be Bhanushali and Kapur playing the characters Gyani and Pali. The boys go to work for the UP gangster-turned-politician Harishankar Tripathi (Rana). At some point it becomes a film about second chances, with the entry of Shetty who plays an ex-Army Major with an air of mystery about him that leads to nothing, and a contrived backstory about corruption allegations that destroyed his career as a champion shooter, I didn’t understand how and why. Of course there’s a romantic element in this sea of triteness: Bhanushali is paired with Sasha Agha, Kapur opposite a perennially mournful-looking Tia Bajpai. And towards the end, Desi Kattey turns into a thriller with a hilarious twist that suggests Pakistan’s involvement in some inexplicable scheme to shame India, by which point I didn’t care enough to make the effort to understand how or why.

It doesn’t feel like a screenplay as much as a desperate attempt at a complex story, with random elements chucked in to spice up the bland proceedings. Hey, it’s too sour, throw in some salt. Too much salt? Add more tomatoes. You get the picture? Good for you, because I watched the entire film and I still haven’t got the picture. Here are some important points to be noted though:

·     * Don’t be misled by the fact that the music is by the usually wonderful Kailash Kher. Except for one nice-though-not-distinctive song that he leads with, the rest are a bore.

·      * Ashutosh Rana is the one bright spark in this disaster. However, he needs to get past his penchant for speaking shuddh, clear, concise Hindi in his trademark fashion, irrespective of what character he’s playing.

·     * Salma Agha’s daughter Sasha Agha in this film is a good example of what indifferent direction and poor written material can do to a promising actor. She was truly interesting when she made her Bollywood debut in a small role in Aurangzeb last year. Here she’s just a sideshow with painted claws that change colour in every scene, that’s all.

·      * On the positive side, Jay Bhanushali, who was laughably lacklustre in his debut Hindi film Hate Story 2 earlier this year, shows some potential here. In that film, he was being paraded about by a director who clearly found him hot. He’s not strutting around in Desi Kattey, which shows him up as a rather attractive guy who is not such a bad actor after all. It’s his good luck that he’s up against Akhil Kapur and Suneil Shetty, who could make boulders look like better performers.

·    * In a weird quirk that harks back to Bollywood of the 1990s and before, in all this film’s romantic scenes, for some reason lovers’ lips always stop short of meeting.

·      * Desi Kattey should be played at medical schools for that one killer scene in which a doc with a brain monitoring contraption of some sort gravely points to graphs showing what we are told was Gyani’s “state of mind” while he achieved various shooting scores.  

Okay, my apologies, but I can’t continue this review. I just fell off my chair again, and I’m finding it hard to type from the floor.

Rating (out of five stars): ½ star

CBFC Rating (India):	U/A
Running time:	143 minutes

Photograph courtesy: https://www.facebook.com/DesiKattey

REVIEW 278: HATE STORY 2

Release date:	July 18, 2014
Director:	Vishal Pandya
Cast: Language:	Surveen Chawla, Jay Bhanushali, Sushant Singh, Siddharth Kher Hindi

Why would you make a sequel to a bad film? Possibly because you think the first one had a USP? Well, here’s the thing: Hate Story peddled itself as a ‘bold’ film, which in Hindi cinema parlance means it had lots of sex. It did – tons more than what we usually see in a Bollywood film, or even for that matter in the average, mainstream Hollywood film. And it was not sleazy in the way C-grade Hindi films can be. That being said, the story of Hate Story had potential but was unable to sustain itself because of its illusions of grandeur, stupidly grandiose dialogues and a good-looking heroine who was so busy looking both hot and horny that she forgot to act.

Like its predecessor, Hate Story 2 too has a basic storyline with potential. It fails to hold itself together because of the bland characterisation of the heroine, an impactless lead actor, a fixation on melodramatic dialogues and a formulaic insertion of songs at inappropriate moments.

One more thing: if you’re going to watch it in the hope of seeing as much sex as in the first instalment, you will – like some of the gentlemen clearly were in my neighbourhood theatre – be disappointed. The trailer lies, my friends. There’s hardly any sex in this film.

In a nutshell, Hate Story 2 is about photography student Sonika (TV’s Surveen Chawla) who is forced to be the mistress of the powerful Maharashtra politician Mandar Mhatre (Sushant Singh). When he punishes her ruthlessly for escaping with her boyfriend Akshay (Jay Bhanushali, also from TV), after a series of horrific tragedies she decides to take revenge.

Films like this – in which a David of a woman takes on a Goliath of a man – can work only if she uses innovative means to exact her vengeance while combating massive hurdles. Sonika, however, hatches two completely unimaginative schemes at the start, and has little trouble planning and executing them. She also makes the transition from a physically battered, emotionally traumatised, mentally disturbed woman suffering from intermittent seizures to a confident, gun-toting, avenging Durga with inexplicable ease.

Chawla does the best she can with the illogical written material, but hers is a dull character. Besides, it’s hard not to be distracted by her startlingly high stilettoes, and the way her perfectly manicured nails and salon-styled hair survive all sorts of extreme situations.

While Hate Story 2 remains a uni-directional wronged-woman-out-to-take-revenge drama almost throughout, it does have some interesting elements. One comes in the form of the allies Sonika finds in her journey – a policeman who’s not a cliché (Siddharth Kher from 2010’s Teen Patti), a journalist who’s not the black/white rendition of mediapersons we usually see in Bollywood, and a third who constitutes an interesting and believable twist in the tale. By the time that twist comes around though, the film has been weighed down too much by its lack of depth and by the unrelenting supply of bombastic lines emerging from Mandar’s lips even in dire situations.

To be fair, the dialogue writing is not without merit in some scenes. Mandar is particularly hilarious when he is challenged in true Hindi filmi style one day by a good guy who roars: “Mandaaaar, mard ka bachcha hai to apne aadmi ko peechhe kar aur khud mere saath lad!” This is where the average Bollywood villain would have succumbed to his ego and shot back an equally melodramatic response. Mandar, however, replies coolly, “Koi shauk nahin mujhe mard ka bachcha banne ka,” while his goons beat the chap to pulp. Timing is of essence when you deliver such lines and Sushant Singh is, without a doubt, one of Bollywood’s best. It’s a pity that this terrific actor – best remembered as Sukhdev from that unfortunately underrated 2002 film The Legend of Bhagat Singh – is so rarely seen these days. The way he immerses himself in Mandar’s character is the best thing about Hate Story 2.

Unfortunately, the writer saddles him with a quirk that should have been given a rest towards the end but is not. Mandar’s old-style dialoguebaazi has him routinely spouting wise two-liners, each preceded by “Baba kehte thhe”. It works up to a point. It works when he has the upper hand. But when he is in a tight spot and he still persists in telling us what Baba used to say, it’s irritating.

The most amusing part of this film is Jay Bhanushali. Poor guy is completely ineffective. He also has zero chemistry with his leading lady. That first time she predictably falls into his arms and they gaze into each other’s eyes, they both look so posed and strained that it’s laughable. When she starts seeing visions of a shimmery version of him, it’s meant to be emotional and all that, but frankly, it’s funny. And when they do get between the sheets soon after she models around in a swimsuit in and out of a pool, their love-making is generic, like two actors going through the motions rather than two human beings with electricity blazing between them. Maybe that’s why she doesn’t take off her bra in that scene! Oh ya, that’s how ‘erotic’ this film is.

To underline their lowwwe, Hate Story 2 resurrects Aaj phir tum pe pyaar aaya hai from the 1988 Madhuri Dixit-Vinod Khanna-starrer Dayavan. The choice of song unwittingly underlines the fact that Chawla is no Dixit. More to the point, although Khanna was way too old for Dixit who was just 21 at the time, he remains one of the hottest men to have ever graced Bollywood, and Bhanushali is not worthy of tying his shoelaces. As for porn queen Sunny Leone’s item number Pink lips, it’s a silly song with silly lyrics and even sillier choreography.

Sushant Singh is the only memorable presence in this feeble film. Oh Bollywood, why on earth do you neglect this man?!

Rating (out of five stars): *1/2

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

Poster courtesy: https://www.facebook.com/HateStory2Film