After watching so many good movies from Vidhu Vinod Chopra, this comes as a super shock. How can a man of VVC’s cadre bring such a movie? Had he had a terrible nightmare that he wanted people to be involved in and help him out to recover from it? And what has happened to Mr. Bachchan? How could he have even signed such a nonsense of a movie? I surely feel he himself was not appealed by the story, which can be seen through his acting in this movie. He has not been able to justify the character’Eklavya’.
The movie has absolutely nothing. No plot, no music(accept ofcourse for some good background sounds), no cinematography and the list is never ending.
Mr. VVC, are you trying to tell us grown up people a folktale which we had heard in our childhood from our grandparents? A rana living in a palace?(it looked more like a brothel) somewhere in Rajasthan with his queen(Sharmila Tagore) and their sick-in-the-head daughter(Raima Sen). Rana is impotent and could not conceive, hence the queen mother had taken the queen away to some remote sadhu and then asked their beloved loyal guard Eklavya(Amitabh Bachchan) to offer his seed. The queen gives birth to twins Saif Ali Khan and Raima Sen(the sick princess). The secret is kept till the queen writes this to her son(Saif Ali Khan) who has gone away to London as he wanted to run away from this horrid palace(If you saw the palace, you would have prayed you were never born). Rana somehow comes to know of this secret and kills his queen in front of their daughter(I never understood why he had to do that in front of her and then leave her to tell this to her brother Saif). The prince returns to finish the last rites of his mother. Rana’s life is in danger and Eklavya(the loyal guard who would kill anybody who got in his Rana’s way) vows to find those who are threatening his Rana’s life.
Rana’s brother(Jackie Shroff) and his son(Jimmy Shergill) makes a plot to kill Eklavya on Rana’s order. But the prince(Saif) hears the plot and also finds out that the duo from their hearts hated Rana. He gives them supari to kill the Rana. Rana is killed. Eklavya recognises the killer from his shoes. Come on Jimmy, you had only one pair of shoes?(ofcourse, this has to be a low budget movie, hence each one was provided with only one pair of wardrobe?
I suppose so.) So Eklavya starts killing his Rana’s killers. Police Inspector(Sanjay Dutt) helps him by keeping his mouth shut as he also has grudges against the Rana(He had buried his father live in one of the walls of the palace and Sanjay Dutt also knew which wall it was, as he keeps showing it in the movie). But, Eklavya spares his son, the prince and then it’s a happy ending. Did I mention the heroine of the movie? Noooo? Well there is nothing to say about her. Accept ofcourse she tries seducing Saif in one of the scenes, but Saif backs away.(A question here, is the prince also impotent? Then there is more to tell for VVC). Only one song, anybody remembers it?