Ek Villian (2014)

A lot of curiosity has been building around ‘Ek Villain’; about its storyline and who actually is the villain in the movie and how? Well to start with, ‘Ek Villain’ is a remake of a South Korean Physiological Thriller movie ‘I Saw the Devil’. So what’s the problem, there is a good foreign movie, lest remake it, but wait let’s make the thriller movie into a romantic, drama, thriller instead, and thus begins the problem.

The characterization of both Hero and Heroine is cliché to the core is to say the least, a hardened criminal with a painful past and no desire to live, and an innocent girl with the heart of gold. Only Ritesh Deshmukh’s character has been worked upon else everything else in the movie is predictable.

Spoilers Alert: Please don’t read the below paragraph if you haven’t seen the movie but intend to see it.

At a certain point of time in the movie we may hope this is a suspense movie, but it is not, it is a straightforward revenge movie where hero tracks and takes revenge from the villain for killing his wife. But there are major loopholes in the movie, the way hero comes to know about the identity of the killer is surprisingly coincidently to the level of being idiotic. Killer’s son comes to a random church, where our hero is already grieving over his loss, the son is also carrying a hand made wind mill made by heroin, which had been taken away by the killer after murdering her. Somebody was needed to work on the script, but they were busy writing cheesy lines for the movie.  One thing that is going to drive the viewers insane is that, the hero catches the villain, beats the crap out of him and leaves him in front of the hospital, so that when he gets better he can beat him again, but why?? Because that is the same thing done in the original movie, but hero in the Korean movie places a transmitter inside villains body, so that he could be tracked anytime, and anywhere, but as our nation is technologically not at par with South Korea, our hero  forgets to do that and leaves the villain just like that, and of course it was just the interval time when the villain was found, so the director needed something to go on for the second half as well. Now look at the way our hero is saved from a murder charge, the witness doesn’t identifies the hero in the court believing our hero should and will get punishment from God instead from a sure shot judgment from the courthouse, come on give me a break. It’s just so easy to rely on luck rather than a strong storyline. And above all while the killer’s identity has been reveled and is being chased by the whole police of the city, suddenly realizes, he would like to see cabaret and visits a dance bar. Pathetic.

Spoilers End

I haven’t seen ‘Aashiqui 2’, but if Shraddha Kapoor’s performance in this movie is any indication, I have dodged a bullet, she can be called “Overacting is Dukaan” for this performance, and every time she starts cracking a joke, I had a strong desire to kick somebody. Mr Director the jokes you have used were in circulation when I was in kinder garden, you have managed to get story from a Korean Movie, jokes from Whattup, bad dialogues from an otherwise talented dialogue writer, and annoying performance from the lead heroine.

However on the up side, performances of both Siddhartha Malhotra and Ritesh Deshmukh are very good, Remo Fernandes has played a supporting role with a different ascent which I liked, KRK (Khan Rashid Khan) is in a small role and he is not as bad as Shraddha Kapoor. Music is certainly good, with ‘Galiyan’ having a hauntingly memorable tune. I would like to specially mention a fight sequence when our hero confronts his old mentor, a very long sequence has been shot in single cut, marvelous.
Overall the movie is not so bad, but just trying to justify the title has been the problem with this movie, just like it had been with ‘Beshram’, ‘Gunday’ and ‘Aurangjeb’ etc. Taking story from a foreign movie is ok, but trying to put Indian sentimentalities is like force feeding, we need to avoid it. People who are going to see the thriller would be disappointed with the love story angle, and people going to see the romance would not be able to digest the storyline.
Rating **.

Holiday (2014)

Here is an interesting fact, producers of this movie wanted the title ‘Holiday’ for this movie, but its rights were with Pooja Bhatt, as she had already made a movie by this name in 2006, you may not remember it as the movie had nothing worth remembering, so the producers approached her and requested for the title, which she denied, maybe she wants to do a sequel. Anyhow the producers instead of going for any other title added ‘A Soldier is Never off Duty’ to the tagline, while Pooja Bhatt kept cursing them in media.

So as you may have already seen in the trailer, the movie deals with a soldier Virat Bakshi (Akshay Kumar) who has come home on holidays, and how he gets entangled in a terrorist plot and how he stops the bad guys forms the rest of the story. So the next question that arise is, is the movie any good? Surely it is.

Without going into any specifics of the story line, the movie is about sleeper cells that are used by terrorists and our protagonist’s battle against them. The movie is fast paced with enough light moments built inside to keep the audience at ease in an otherwise tense subject; you keep on wondering about the next move of our hero as well as the villain. What really appreciable about the screenplay is the way both the protagonist and antagonist approach to outsmart each other, it is good to see some thought given to the planning and analysis part in the movie, where other movies generally doesn’t go into the details about how the villain or hero deduced certain information, this movie is all about that, so good work.

Having said that, the movie is not without its flaws, first and foremost, Akshay Kumar is shown as the member of an intelligence agency however during the entire events of the movie, he does not once bother to involve his agency or superiors into the problem at hand, he enlist the help of his friends at certain times but his agency remains nowhere in picture while he keeps on making dangerous decisions which is seriously odd. If his character was shown to be of a simple army officer without any backup than probably the movie would have made greater sense, secondly the entire Govind’s track looks forced on the screenplay, like they decided to include it at a later stage of filming, but still it’s nice to see him on screen after a long time, and last drawback of the movie is its music, no song make an impression barring the last some ‘naina’ which could actually bring tears to your eyes, amazing lyrics.

The high point of the movie is the internal portion when Akshay attempts to stop an immediate terrorist attack with the help of his friends.

All and all the movie is a worthy entrant into the 100 cr club, unlike some other garbage. Go for this one.

Rating ***1/2

Samay: When Time Strikes (2003)

The year was 2003; I went to watch this suspense thriller movie with one of my very dear friend, and I remember exactly what I told him when we left the theatre after the movie finished, I told him that this movie is instantaneously going to be a big flop, not because it is a bad movie, but because it is too good, as people are still interested in movies with romance and predictable culminations.  

Whether the movie performed well or not, I don’t know as I am not aware about the box office collections of the movie, but since the movie is seldom discussed within movie enthusiast I believe the movie has not gotten the credit it deserved.  So what’s so great about this movie?

To start with the movie has an airtight screenplay, every scene has some significance to the story; however one song could have been spared with. The movie is about one cop Malvika Chauhan (Sushmita Sen) who is trying to catch serial killer responsible for multiple murders, apparently there is no visible connection between those murders and other people in force are not even considering them to be connected, however Sushmita is not convinced and keeps pursuing the case. The cat and mouse chase that follows is superb.

In India not many movies have been made on serial killer genre, the other movie that comes into mind is ‘The Stone man Murders’ which in my opinion was a very week movie, but Hollywood has amply explored this genre, in fact this movie is a ‘remake’ of a Hollywood movie; Seven (1995) starring Bred Pitt, Morgan Freeman and Kevin Spacey. Ironically I believe the Hindi remake is much better than the original, as the director has changed the story substantially and given it a much better prospective.

Now for any suspense movie not only Who (Who did the murder) and How (How did he/she did that) are important, but one more important question is Why (Why the crime was committed). Indian movie have always been very lame in this regard, generally money, or love are the predominant reasons behind crime in Bollywood movie, but this is where Samay scores heavily, in the climax the viewer not only gets to know the identity of the killer, but an extraordinary explanation behind the motive of the murders, and mark my words the explanation is extra ordinary and simply amazing, and the climax is a knockout.

Having said that, there may be people who may not like the ‘Why’ part, well it’s their prerogative and I respect that, but for me, this movies climax was as good as it can get, and I will rate this movie in line with other classics like ‘Jewel Thief’ and ‘A Wednesday’.  

An absolute must for any suspense movie fan.

Rating ****.