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 **.