Amodini's Movie Reviews

The plot is sketchy-thin, with Lucky (Sneha Ullal) being a shy schoolgirl in St.Petersburg, with dad Ravi Baswani employed at the Indian embassy. She is by chance, thrown together with Aditya Sekri (Khan), the son of Indian ambassodor (Gokhale), who is driving down in his speedy roadster from Europe to Russia. The pair must stick together while striving to escape insurgency and terrorists, and ofcourse get romantically involved. Help is on its way in the form of Colonel Pindidas Kapoor (Mithun) who plays the detective out to look for the two.

Ms. Ullal, who is actually (gasp!) playing her age in this movie, resembles Mayuri Kanungo, you know – the actress who made her debut vs. Jugal Hansraj. However, Sneha cannot act, and most of her “acting” on screen comes across as a dumb, coy potrayal of a female not in possession of all mental faculties. Salman is himself, good at comedy, passable otherwise. Mithun is barely adequate. The characters are not fleshed out in depth, anddon’t really sync. up. Take for example, Lucky, the beautiful innocent, who on the spur of the moment, belts out a hip-gyrating, “worldly”, number titled “Lucky Lips”. So much for contrived innocence !

The locales are beautiful, but dialogues inane. Salman gets to be manly and display his biceps. Sneha gets to look pretty and dumb. The film, although technically polished lacks in character, adequate story development and screenplay. Big problems indeed. The music is one of the good things about this film, with catchy numbers and a decent background score. However, it really can’t hold up the film. In totality, a bad film, best avoided.

Set in the Southern city of Hyderabad, and neighboring villages, this is a tale with musical nuances. The plot although clear and convincing, lascks lustre in execution. Not good enough to be called engrossing, the film does hold your interest.The film starts off with musical Swarnalatha (Azmi) and violin-playing Vaishnavi () and their children boarding a bus to go to the city, where the women are to perfom. The bus however, plunges off a bridge into the river. Vaishnavi, and Swarnalatha’s son are drowned. Swarnalatha in grief now lives in self-imposed exile, believing that it was her ambition that caused the deaths.

Twenty years later, Abhinay (Prakash Rao), Vaishnavi’s son is a music composer, who fed up with composing jingles for ads, quits his job and decides to start-up a music group/band. He meets Pinky/Priyanka (Perizaad) who becomes the group’s singer. As he gathers group members, he also decides to enlist the help of carnatic singer Swarnalatha, his dead mother’s old friend. Can she overcome her fears to help these young musicians define an identity for themselves in the music world ?

The film has two things going for it. Firstly, Ms. Azmi’s great talent, and secondly the story. The story is moving and unfolds interestingly. Shabana Azmi is what she is, a wonderful actress, essaying this role with just as much finesse as she does any other. Perizaad is adequate in her potrayal of Pinky, while Prakash Rao is poor in the depiction of any emotion. I am no fan of Carnatic music, hence the music didn’t leave me wanting me more.

The direction is just about average, and screenplay infirm, causing some scenes to play out like unrealistic rehearsals of the real thing. Dialogues are earthy and banal, no profound sentiments here. The film’s premise offers ample room to explore emotional undercurrents. However the opportunity remains unused, leading to an impression of superficial-ness throughout. Another thing I could have done without are the digs at “modern” women (disguised as comedy ??) as depicted by Pinky’s boutique running mother Mrs. Kapoor (Lillette Dubey).

All that said, this film is still worth watching for the story it tells, without resorting to commercial tricks. So, here’s to an interesting hour and a half.

Husband Aditya (Anil Kapoor) arriving for the birth finds his wife dead and is bereft. This is when the parents use their acute intelligence and decide that Kareena will be the perfect mom for the motherless kids. Kareena agrees, marries Aditya and flies off to Delhi, without a word to Raja. She devotes her life to be a mom and wife, but is unable to draw Aditya any closer. So after 3 years of the cold treatment from her husband, when she spies Raja in Delhi, and is pursued by him, she is tempted ….

This movie combines bad acting, an atrocious script, unrealistic situations, hard-to-sit-through dialogues, and incoherent reasoning into one solidly pathetic film. Darshan, through this one film, flaunts his total lack of vision. Anil Kapoor comes into his own as a pure-bred MCP (male chauvinist pig) in the first half of the movie. After the intermission he magically morphs into caring husband and grows a funny bone (its kind of like a bunion). Also meets, per chance, the friends from hell (Manoj Bajpai and Shamita shetty as a gruesome twosome). Bajpai as Aditya’s friend Dil Arora is surreally bad here, and the less seen and said about Ms. Shetty the better.

Akshay Kumar appears with a goatee in the first half (well… all aspiring musicians have goatees, you know). His acting is as always; wooden. Kareena, romances, sings and cries her way through the movie, and none too well at that. Kabir Bedi and Nafisa Ali, are pretty unbearable as the hymn-chanting placid parents. Sushmita Sen is adequate in her teeny-tiny role.

The film flows with one incongruity slapped upon another. Besides which, the director adds to the mix, the jaded old formula of selfless Bhartiya (or Canadian) nari. Music is decent. However, this film is exquisite torture. Inflict it with care.

The film starts with a photo-surveillance mission, near the border, by two airforce officers Flight Lieutenant Shezad Khan (Sunil Shetty) and Squadron Leader Vikram Rathore (Sanjay Dutt) in a helicopter. Remain alert now, because seeing two bad actors mouthing inane dialogue, sans emotion, can put the most enthusiastic movie watcher into a stupor (and this is just the begining). Now patriotism runs in these officers veins instead of plain, good old blood, and therefore when they spot an unconscious man down in the snow, they put down the chopper to rescue him, against the wishes of mission command. Man rescued and still unconscious the officers discover the man’s personal diary. Having no qualms about reading personal stuff for pure amusement, they dig into it with gusto.

The diary reading then, is played out in a series of flashbacks, detailing for us the life of the rescued man Sepoy Tarun Chauhan (Bobby Deol) also known as Tango charlie. Tarun is a soldier in the Border Security force, and his first mission is in Eastern India, under the leadership of Havaldar Mohammed Ali (Ajay Devgan) fighting the Bodos. Tarun faces war and the loss of innocence as he realises its futility. He however displays bravery, and integrity, and continues his missions in other parts of India (Andhra fighting the Naxalites, and Gujarat dispersing riotous mobs).

Interspersed with all this are the romantic love stories of Tarun and Ali. Lachi (Tanishaa) is the English-speaking, bubbly daughter of the village pharmacist (Tiku Talsania), and a Computer engineer herself. Tarun is besotted with her inspite of the fact that her father will not agree to pay a dowry, much to the chagrin of Tarun’s father (Alok Nath). Ali’s wife is played by Nandana Sen, seen recently in “Black”.

The women have small roles, and thankfully so do Sanjay Dutt and Sunil Shetty. Devgan displays his considerable acting talent, while Deol displays his limited theatrical range. The dialogues could have been better, and the music is nothing to write home about. Still, a valiant effort from the director, and worth watching once.