MANOJ SASIDHARAN

Vulgarity Par Excellence! Which degenerate audience was this film made for? One is forced to wonder. If there were an Oscar for obscenity, this production would win it without contest. From the opening minutes it sinks into a swamp of sleaze, joining juvenile writing with grotesque visuals. In one scene, a hostage situation is reduced to the crudest possible device: the girl explicitly tells a soldier to arouse himself, and the film shows this on screen in graphic detail, as though it were art. That is the kind of “innovation” the makers and their patrons expect us to applaud. But the true scandal lies not with the director or the cast, but with the Indian Censor Board, which has stamped its approval on this carnival of vulgarity. Every few moments the film assaults the audience with yet another indecency, yet the Board, supposedly the guardian of public standards, has permitted it without restraint. In doing so, it has betrayed its mandate, disgraced its office, and mocked the very idea of regulation. This is not cinema. It is relentless vulgarity wrapped in the garb of storytelling. The Board’s certification does not legitimise it—it exposes the rot within the system. If any award is due, it is to the Censor Board itself: for dereliction of duty, for contempt of the audience, and for turning a blind eye to one of the most shameless spectacles ever released in the name of entertainment.

This will surely make Mills and Boon mortally insecure. Naïve, pretty and a tad bit damaged girl meets neurosurgeon with Greek God looks (you get the wind of it, right?). Coincidentally, both happen to be Olympic level flirts. And oh, they didn’t forget to add complex layers. The girl has a history - she saved someone’s life, and it comes around and saves hers. Well anyway, after fire-hosing us with dripping romance, very close (really close) to the end, redemption comes, but not before you stop caring - the plot tries to redeem itself with a “breakthrough” realisation where our maiden realises that she was being like her mother, putting up with violence. That movie can’t fail, the movie hall was filled with giggling girls .. and as we survivors finally filed out in stupefied daze, we could hear them gushing about how profound and layered it was ! If you are a teenaged girl who can’t have enough of high octane romance, this movie is a gift from God. And then you have a right to be forgiven for indulging in excess.

A tragic effort at movie making genius. One wonders if the movie was an experimental effort to paint contrast using a bun (actually, one whole packet of it) as the canvas, paintbrush and paint ! But that at least took about ten minutes to become clear. The cinematography is no less an alarming effort at genius right from the opening frame by giving the audience a “dog’s eye view” and myopic closeups all through, presumably calculated to be a refreshing departure from the other extreme of the “bird’s eye view”. There are many efforts at creating comedy, but without a single exception, they came across as a comedy of errors at the attempt. It is claimed that the movie pays homage to the millions of cases pending across courts in India. Considerable time is spent in giving the audience courtroom experience. Despite that the court proceedings are ridiculously far from real court proceedings. I can tell you that as a member of the lawyer community. Of the way too numerous excesses of the movie, perhaps what deserves special mention is the excessive effort at creating real life atmosphere, be it by focusing on meaningless chatter and gesticulations of characters in the police station, or of the same in the courtroom characters. Hangover of a successful technique from a previous movie employed excessively in a subsequent one ? The movie comes through as excessively excessive in its treatment of everything, including treatment of the suffering audience. You think I am being alarmist? You must go watch 👍🏻