REVIEW 499: BANK CHOR

Release date:	June 16, 2017
Director:	Bumpy
Cast: Language:	Riteish Deshmukh, Vivek Anand Oberoi, Rhea Chakraborty, Sahil Vaid, Bhuvan Arora, Vikram Thapa, Upendra Limaye, Cameos by Baba Sehgal and Vikram Gokhale Hindi

Considering the reputation Riteish Deshmukh and Vivek Oberoi have built for themselves in the comedy genre, it might be natural to assume that any collaboration between them would be filled with rhyming jokes, crass wisecracks about butts, breasts, farts and faeces, and other clichéd devices used by creators of low-grade slapstick humour. Bank Chor is a good example of why you should not pre-judge a film based on reputations. Far from being a crude comedy, writer-director Bumpy’s second film is pretty serious stuff, a seemingly innocuous comic thriller that says a lot while appearing to do little beyond trying to amuse and wow the audience at a very basic level – like the film, there is more to this sentence than meets the eye for now.

Bank Chor begins with three idiots who ain’t no Ocean’s eleven, botching up their attempt to rob a branch of the fictitious Bank of Indians (BOI) in Mumbai. The name at first sounds like a funny take on existing Indian bank names, but like most things in this film, it means something beyond its face value. This truly is a BANK OF INDIANS, housing and safeguarding our collective national intelligence, self-preservation skills and survival instincts.

So Champak (Deshmukh) and his accomplices Gulab and Genda (played by Bhuvan Arora and Vikram Thapa) look like they will not get anything right as they try to loot this BOI. The bumbling fools are further slowed down by CBI officer Amjad Khan (Oberoi) who unexpectedly arrives on the spot to deal with what should have just been a case for the Mumbai Police.

What’s the CBI doing at a simple bank heist? Ah, that would be telling.

Also in this mix are a now dead investigative journalist (Vikram Gokhale), Maharashtra’s corrupt Home Minister (Upendra Limaye) and a well-meaning reporter (Rhea Chakraborty) among the media crowd milling outside the bank.

The first half of the film is devoted to the central trio’s stupidity combined with the Mumbai-versus-Delhi and intra-NCR rivalry in their group. The barbs going back and forth between them are worthy of laughs because Bumpy and his team of co-writers here play on stereotypes without perpetuating them and gently mock those who do. There are, for instance, swipes aplenty directed at netas who have encouraged resentment and violence against ‘outsiders’ in Mumbai in the past decade. When a Mumbaikar in the film asks a Dilliwaala to get out of the city, the gentleman shoots back: If Delhiites return to Delhi, who will do the work here in Mumbai? Touché.

(The writing, by the way, has been credited as follows: story: Baljeet Singh Marwah and Bumpy; dialogues: Ishita Moitra Udhwani; screenplay: Marwah, Bumpy, Omkar Sane and Udhwani.)

The parochial friction between the accomplices holds up even when the plot starts to drag – or at least it seems to drag, until it emerges (or at least that is what my generous soul suggests) that even that lax pace was probably deliberate, designed to lull us into a stupor as nothing much happens on screen. And then it does. Post-interval Bank Chor revs up, there are new developments at every turn, followed by an unexpected climax. The speed at which the story progresses leaves little time to dwell on loopholes and question marks over the modus operandi employed by the villains.

If this was all there was to it, Bank Chor would have ended up being a moderately interesting, harmless entertainer. There is more though. By pointedly and repeatedly emphasising the religious identity of certain players in the saga, Bumpy and his team add a mischievous layer to their entire storyline, making their film not just about good people in conflict with evil, or ordinary citizens besting corrupt corporates and netas, but also about the ‘good Hindu’, an Aam Aadmi, overcoming the ‘bad Muslim’ (complete with Urdu-laden dialogues, a background from Faizabad and a sadistic delight in tearing into living flesh). That the ‘bad Muslim’ is used by the powers that be to exploit their own people does not make it better. Oh wily Muslim and Enemies Within, do not take the ‘good Hindu’ for granted or be misled by his surface naivete, says Bank Chor’s facile symbolism.

For the record, to counter such objections from cynics, the film throws a ‘good Muslim’ into the blend and gets the Aam Aadmi a.k.a. the Common Man to let on in the end that his name was not what he claimed it was at first and that a name, in fact, is irrelevant.

It is not, dear Team Bank Chor. Names lead to assumptions about human beings, particularly in the communally charged atmosphere pervading our nation right now. So in case you claim innocence in this matter, in case you insist that you genuinely did not intend to convey any point subliminally, then let me throw back at you a line that a crucial antagonist in the film directs at a Mr Nice Guy: innocence (maasoomiyat) is the biggest problem in this world. The unthinking liberal, if that is what you are, often does more harm than the committed communalist.

As far as performances go, the three leads do a decent job of playing off each other’s crookishness, though Bhuvan Arora and Vikram Thapa suffer the effects of shallow characterisation – just because they play Champak/Deshmukh’s sidekicks, does not mean they should have been half-heartedly written. Vivek Anand Oberoi nee Viveik Oberoi nee Vivek Oberoi is effective. To re-capture the intensity he brought to his memorable debut performance aeons back in Company, he will need a screenplay to match. Still, it is a relief to see him in a role that does not require the cringe-inducing tomfoolery of the Masti series.

Rhea Chakraborty as a mediaperson is so-so, though her wardrobe by Maxima Basu – a tight pencil skirt made of leather, no less, a noodle-strapped top and stilettos – is laughably unreal for a working journalist sweating it out on the streets of Mumbai. Seriously, Bollywood, would some research hurt?

The stand-out cast member is Sahil Vaid as one of the hostages in the bank. Vaid here reveals his versatility in a role vastly different from his calling cards so far, Poplu in Humpty Sharma Ki Dulhania and Som in Badrinath Ki Dulhania. The rest of the supporting players are fair enough.

Bank Chor is produced by Yash Raj Films’ youth banner Y-Films. Bumpy made his directorial debut with an earlier Y-Films offering, Luv Ka The End (2011), starring Shraddha Kapoor and Taaha Shah. That one was an occasionally engaging but mostly dull affair. Despite its many misses, Bank Chor has more verve. Whatever little progress Bumpy has made as a filmmaker, however, is far outweighed by the insidious messaging of this film which cashes in on the prejudices that wrack Indian society today below a mask of good intentions, comedy and thrills. Sorry young man, you do not get to claim maasoomiyat here.

Rating (out of five stars): *

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	120 minutes 9 seconds

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/bank-chor-movie-review-this-riteish-deshmukh-vivek-oberoi-starrer-is-not-as-maasoom-as-it-seems-3684489.html

Poster courtesy: Yash Raj Films

Vivek Oberoi photograph courtesy: Raindrop Media

REVIEW 495: DOBAARA – SEE YOUR EVIL

Release date:	June 2, 2017
Director:	Prawaal Raman
Cast: Language:	Huma Qureshi, Adil Hussain, Saqib Saleem, Lisa Ray, Rhea Chakraborty Hindi

Let’s face it: Bollywood does not do horror and spook stories well. The long intervals between the very few effective supernatural thrillers the industry has produced in the past century – such as Mahal, Madhumati and Bhoot – is a testament to that. In the same year as Ram Gopal Varma’s Bhoot, in 2003, director Prawaal Raman did manage an interesting anthology of short stories titled Darna Mana Hai (Fear Is Not Allowed). The genre has suffered a drought since then.

Raman’s new film, Dobaara: See Your Evil, fails to end this dry spell.

Based on the 2014 Hollywood hit Oculus, Dobaara (featuring the original film’s director Mike Flanagan as its executive producer) tells the story of a 25-year-old woman called Natasha Merchant (Huma Qureshi) who believes a tragedy that befell her family 11 years earlier was caused by a haunted mirror that possessed her father, the artist Alex Merchant (Adil Hussain). Natasha and her brother Kabir Alex Merchant (played in adulthood by Saqib Saleem) were children when the police found them in their home in the English countryside, a gun in Kabir’s hand while Alex lay dead from a gunshot wound and the body of the mother (Lisa Ray) in another part of the house. Both siblings claimed that Kabir was innocent in the matter. After a decade of therapy, Kabir emerges in the real world, convinced that the ghostly happenings in their home were a figment of his and Natasha’s imagination, and that their parents’ deaths were a result of a marriage that had fallen apart because Dad was having an affair. Natasha remains convinced though that themirrordunnit.

Dobaara begins with Kabir’s release from a correctional facility. Natasha has spent the decade investigating the mirror and has found that many of its previous owners ended up dead in a gruesome fashion in mysterious circumstances. On Kabir’s return, she holds him to a promise he had made to her as a child – a promise to kill the mirror together. First though, she wants to prove to the world that her family was innocent in what happened to them. So, she has set up the mirror in her house with multiple cameras to record what happens when she and Kabir spend time before it.

Oculus, the material on which Dobaara is based, was much busier. This film has virtually nothing happening in the pre-interval portion except talk, talk and more boring talk between the siblings, and post-interval, when matters do speed up, it is too late.

The film runs on multiple tracks in the second half, inter-cutting between Natasha and Kabir’s childhood and present, and their differing viewpoints on occurrences within the house in their adulthood. It should have been fascinating and suspenseful, but Dobaara fails to recover from the absolute lack of energy that sets in in the first hour.

Besides, everything seems so pointless when Natasha, who set up all those cameras with such fanfare, does not bother to check the recorded footage at any point – as a result, we do not at any point get to see the difference between what she and Kabir think happened to them and what actually did.

The actors end up being victims of the film’s  listless writing, direction and editing. Saleem reveals a glimpse or two of his natural talent in a couple of scenes. Hussain – who was so brilliant in his last Bollywood film Mukti Bhawan just weeks back – tries his best to invest himself in the role, but is left struggling in the absence of overall heft. That said, for some reason, his English dialogue delivery sounds occasionally awkward here. It must be said too that the children’s accented English inexplicably gives way to perfectly desi speaking styles as grown-ups.

This lack of attention to detail is the least of Dobaara’s problems. The lack of ominousness is. The suggestive title, some mumbo jumbo about how everything that happens to us has already happened before and the allusion to a well-known children’s fairytale all amount to nothing in the face of such dull storytelling.

Dobaara takes forever to take off, and when it does, it is a non-starter.

And so the drought continues...

Rating (out of five stars): 1/2

CBFC Rating (India):	A
Running time:	107 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/dobaara-see-your-evil-movie-review-huma-qureshi-saqib-saleem-thriller-takes-forever-to-take-off-3509117.html

Poster courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dobaara:_See_Your_Evil and IMDB

REVIEW 298: SONALI CABLE

Release date:	October 17, 2014
Director:	Charudatt Acharya
Cast: Language:	Rhea Chakraborty, Ali Fazal, Smita Jaykar, Anupam Kher, Swanand Kirkire Hindi

If David doesn’t look like David in a David-vs-Goliath film, you know you have a problem.

The film shares its title with a small-time cable Internet agency in Mumbai, the owner of which refuses to sell her shop when a large corporate entity called Shining decides it wants to monopolise the broadband business in the city. Sonali Dattaram Tandel (Rhea Chakraborty) is a feisty, fiery creature who won’t brook nonsense from anyone. Abandoned by her mother in her childhood, now as an adult she mothers her alcoholic father (Swanand Kirkire). If you want to buy out her tiny enterprise, Sonali Cable, you don’t phone her and tell her to visit you in your humungous office building with the intimidatingly massive lobby; you don’t tell her, you make a polite request. Goes without saying that there’s nothing polite about the bullies in suits from Shining.

And thence commences the enmity that almost destroys this gutsy gali ki chhokri, her friendships and especially her relationship with her boyfriend Raghu (Ali Fazal), son of Mumbai politician Meenatai Pawar (Smita Jaykar).

Disappointingly for a film co-produced by veteran Ramesh Sippy and his son Rohan, the lady neta’s name is its only cheeky touch. The late Balasaheb Thackeray’s wife was Meenatai, and Pawar is, well, you know the Pawars. Looks like writer-director Charudatt Acharya was having fun there.

No idea what happened thereafter. The introduction to the disparate cast of characters working with Sonali and the basic plotline are successful in getting viewer interest piqued. Unfortunately, too much unravels too soon in this film.

There are many elements that appear promising – the father-daughter relationship minus the presence of a mother figure (not common in Bollywood films), the personal touch offered by small business operators, the potential collusion between politics and big business, the bleak future of small businesses when that collusion takes place, and more. All this is particularly relevant in the context of the continuing FDI-in-retail-vs-the-future-of-kirana-stores debate. Sadly, Acharya fails to flesh out these elements and take them forward, which is odd considering that his earlier co-writing credits include films vastly superior to this one: the unusual horror flick Vaastu Shastra, the interesting though inconsistent Dum Maaro Dum and the delightfully quirky, layered Ayushmann Khurrana-starrer Nautanki Saala (the last two directed by Rohan Sippy). Sonali Cable merely skims the surface of everything it deals with, while our little Ms David and the people at Shining end up looking like clichés.

Besides, though the actors in Sonali’s office and home settings are believable, and Smita Jaykar feels very real as a politician of questionable morals, Rhea Chakraborty sticks out like a sore thumb. She is just too glammed-up to fit the part of a young woman sweating it out in a narrow bylane in lower middle-class quarters in a congested city. She has an expressive face but her makeup is too flawless, her jewellery too well-matched to her stylish, figure-emphasising clothes. In a country where working women are extremely careful about the way they are turned out for fear of being misunderstood, I’m not saying a real-life Sonali Tandel shouldn’t dress like this woman, but that she wouldn’t dress like her on the job in the kind of job she does.

Sonali’s posture too is more like that of a professional model at a studio shoot than a woman running a corner shop. Notice how she stands, her dainty hands planted just above her hips to underline her tiny waist that is already highlighted by her impeccably cut tops. Let’s get real!

Ali Fazal is the cute-looking guy who played Vidya Balan’s boyfriend in Bobby Jasoos earlier this year. Fazal has a likeable screen presence and delivers a neat performance here, despite the half-baked screenplay. The redeeming factor for Chakraborty is that she has good chemistry with him. In fact, they’re hot together when they cuddle up.

The villains in the story never make the transition from cardboard cutouts to real human beings: there’s the sleazy corporation owner (Anupam Kher), his obsequious second-in-command who is out of his depth in the job throughout but is not fired anyway, and a third man who seems far wiser than the second-in-command but does not take over the job. At least Kher’s character boasts of an innovative quirk that is effectively icky: he has a earbud permanently stuck in his ear, thus constantly conjuring up visions of ear wax and – don’t ask me why – people who pick their noses or men who don’t wash their hands after peeing. This, his obsession with khakra and the ridiculous tasks he gives his ever-on-call gori firangi Woman Friday are amusing to begin with, but after a while they become yawn-worthy and you want to see evidence of action in his bustling mega-company beyond those three men mostly cooped up in a room.

The last thing you would expect from Ramesh and Rohan Sippy is a film that looks like it ran out of both money and imagination early on. In addition to better writing and casting, this one needed more extras in more frames and sets that weren’t trying hard to look like natural settings.

Sweetness of intent can’t make up for superficial content. Too much of Sonali Cable feels as if a section of the team lost interest in this project long before it was wrapped up.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	U/A
Running time:	128 minutes

Photograph courtesy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonali_Cable