Film Review: WAR… CHHOD NA YAAR

Very credible premise, BUT…… 

Cast: Sharman Joshi, Jaaved Jaaferi, Soha Ali Khan, Dalip Tahil, Sanjay Mishra, Manoj Pahwa
Story Idea, Writer, Director: Faraz Haider

Venkat and I went for the film in Cinemax Sion on the day of its release. We were kind of dubious about it when we saw that there were less than 50 people watching the film with us.

THE STORY

The film begins with Captain Raj (Sharman Joshi) of the Indian Army and Captain Qureshi (Jaaved Jaaferi) of the Pakistan Army getting together with a couple of other colleagues to play a game of cards. They sit on the sides of the wire fence at the border and have a ball.

Suddenly, shooting breaks out and the story goes into flashback. At the Defence Minister’s (Dalip Tahil) insistence, GBC TV sends its correspondent Ruth Dutta (Soha Ali Khan) to the border to get information about an impending war between India and Pakistan. But what she finds there is something else altogether.

The Chinese Premier (also Dalip Tahil) has a video conference with the Indian Defence Minister as well as the Pakistan Minister (Dalip Tahil again), promising the sky. Then there is the Defence Minister of the USA (you guessed right that it is Dalip Tahil) wheeling and dealing with the defence heads of both India and Pakistan.

Watch the film for the hilarious turn of events.

MY PERCEPTION

The film runs for 119 minutes and is set in real time of less than 24 hours. The chemistry between Sharman Joshi and Jaaved Jaaferi (yeah, that’s the spelling in this film while the actor keeps changing it pretty often) is very good.

Soha Ali Khan’s role as a correspondent is quite simple and she could not but do it well. There is no scope for emoting or acting that was required.

Manoj Pahwa

The comedy is not too bad but then again it was not that good either. I have seen way better performances by Sharman Joshi, Jaaved Jaaferi and Sanjay Mishra. Despite having four roles, Dalip Tahil was not used up to his potential.

Manoj Pahwa is excellent at comedy and very expressive. He was totally wasted in the film. In fact, the film reminded me of an ad Manoj Pahwa had featured in where he plays an officer in the Indian Military. He is offered a drink by his equal from Pakistan across the wire fence at the border. He was just fantastic in it.

All I can say is that there is no depth to the dialogues and execution. I would blame the writer-director for this.

Having mentioned all the negative points, I must say that the Story Idea is brilliant – befitting the oncoming Golden Age. I just loved the message that the people of both the countries – India and Pakistan – are not interested in war. That’s so true! And I am sure that includes the military of both countries too. It’s quite possible that we have become puppets in the hands of the stronger countries and they are playing on our insecurities. Very credible!

I only wish that the film had been made more interesting.

VERDICT: Watchable! But not worth the 220 bucks we paid per ticket.

RATING: ** ½ (could have been smarter)

*Silly
**Shaky
***Smart
****Snazzy
*****Super

Film Review: RA-ONE

I think it's high time that SRK accepts his age and tries to create special roles to suit him - something in the lines of Chak De. This film is all hype and no show

Cast: Shah Rukh Khan, Kareena Kapoor, Arjun Rampal, Dalip Tahil, Shahana Goswami, Armaan Verma
Director: Anubhav Sinha

I had a very bad feeling about this one from Red Chillies Entertainment as the films produced by SRK’s company have only one thing going – SRK starring in them. And most of the time, even that does not help. Anyway, I went to see it because my daughter and husband were keen to go. And that's how we caught the 10.30 pm show on Diwali.

THE STORY: Shekhar Subramaniam (Shah Rukh Khan) works for a video gaming company called Barron Industries run by Dalip Tahil. Jenny (Shahana Goswami) is a co-worker and so is Jackie Chan (Tom Wu). Shekhar is a South Indian (Tamil) who is married to Sonia (Kareena Kapoor) and their son is preteen Prateek (Armaan Verma).

Prateek is a typical school kid who is impressed by mighty villains. He quite dislikes his father’s nerdy nature and tries to be ‘cool’ most of the time. When the boss demands that a new video game be created, Shekhar goes on to create a game that has a dominant villain – Ra-One – who is undefeatable. This is done at his son’s suggestion and soon Prateek is enamoured by both the game and his father’s skills.

Unfortunately, Ra-One has the power to re-invent himself and is keen to get out of the game and kill Lucifier – the nickname that Prateek uses to play the game. He does just that and soon Shekhar is killed.

Not knowing the actual situation, Sonia decides to move to India to their family home along with Prateek.

Watch the film to see what happens when Ra-One decides to follow Lucifer (Prateek) to India and kill him.

MY PERCEPTION: On the positive side, the animation was just fantastic. That’s about it.

SRK comes up with different hair-styles – each one of them sucks. His make-up and act as a Tamilian was simply horrible. I felt it more so because I am myself a Tamilian. His hair-style was stupid, his accent was dumb and whatever.

SRK as G-One was better. He did well. But the sad part was there was too much masala, making the whole presentation a mix-up of cuisines ending up in a mess, if you know what I mean.

Kareena Kapoor was good and the song Chammak Challo was very good. Armaan Verma did well in his role as Prateek.

Arjun Rampal was good as the villain although his part was minuscule. He looked hot with his head shaved off. Considering that he does not have a great range to his expressions, the role fitted him perfectly with one vengeful expression throughout the shot.

I can relate to a film that begins at A and ends with Zee with a lot of incidents thrown in between. This one started at A and took off in many different directions before falling plop on its face at Zee.

I don’t have a clue about making films, but my hand itched to take over at so many points where I would have handled the sequences way differently than they actually were.

The 3-D was pretty non-existent. In fact, a couple of days before Diwali, I had read somewhere that the 3-D effort was not taking off. Hence, I wanted to watch a 2-D version. But there were none available at Cinemax Sion. Maybe nowhere!

If I wore the glasses, I could see 2 images in most of the scenes. If I took them off, I saw 4 images. A quaint experience, indeed! But at what cost!

Rajnikant popping into the film for a 1-minute sequence as Chitti was nothing short of ridiculous. It just had nothing to do with the film. And the superhero looked quite ill. Why the director or producer never noticed that one, amazes me.

You cannot quite call it a kids’ film with the kind of dance sequences, fight sequences and dialogues on ‘condom’. It was not entertaining enough for adults. And after all this, Shah Rukh Khan plans to impress the world population. That’s some gall!

VERDICT: Yet another waste of money for me, folks! This time, I don’t even have the excuse that it was worth it for SRK’s sake.

RATING: ** Shaky

* Silly
** Shaky
*** Smart
**** Snazzy
***** Super