Any movie which has the name(s) Vishesh Films and/or Mahesh Bhatt on its posters and first frame is worth a watch, by default. Blood money was an interesting title and although the lead pair looked bland in the promos, I had to watch this movie because it is a Mahesh Bhatt product.
Rating: 2.5/5.0
It has all the characteristics of a typical Bhatt product: decent music, speedy narration, good dialogues, and plausible storyline. But Kunal Khemmu is no Emraan Hashmi and Amrita Puri is no Sonal Chauhan. So this somewhat corrupt copy of ‘Jannat’ fails in creating the whole ‘package’ compelling enough to give it anything more than 2.5 stars; although with a better lead pair and more detailed story I would have given it 3.5 stars at least.
The story is about an honest man getting trapped in the ugly worldwide trade in diamonds. Kunal Khemmu starts a new job at a diamond trading firm in South Africa and encounters accounting frauds, terrorism funding and so on.
Diamond sourcing, trading and financing is an ugly business; which is an open secret. But the film just tangentially touches the real issues and hence the gravity of the situation never really comes out. The office scenes are childishly written & executed (especially the ‘deal’ that Khemmu wins initially, I was beginning to wonder whether this was going to be a comedy film) and the so called ‘twist’ in the climax comes out of the blue and does not look realistic or well planned at all. But apart from this, the remaining 70% or so of the film is well packaged.
The performance of the actor playing the villain is convincing enough. Sadly, the same can’t be said about Khemmu and Puri. Mahesh Bhatt has always hired rank outsiders and turned them into stars (which is why he is easily the best director and producer in the industry, in my opinion); but doing the same with these two seems very difficult. Ms. Puri has some weird accent that is very irritating, and it’s not an English accent as her English delivery is equally pathetic. Khemmu, in spite of having the best lines, is plain annoying and ineffective. Overall rating for both these is 1/5 on output and 0/5 on efforts.
Overall, this is an old wine in new bottle. Some stupid stereotypes like money is evil, poverty is ethics, success must be based on fraud and all that we have seen in past (and will see in future too) Vishesh Films are all present here. But overall, an ok package that is watchable on TV/DVD.