Let me confess..i didnt see this movie from the beginning...last week I was back at my couch late night before the teevee with nothing better to do with my time and I ran across this movie..first thing that caught my attention was that i’d not even heard of the movie nor seen any promo material of it..im not one who keeps tabs of movies, but still my random visits to my couch are enuf to keep me updated on whats happening in bollyland..
So I decided to take the plunge with Booby..er..sorry Bobby (heck! I just couldnt resist typing that :-D) and Niwas.
The scene where I started out was when Ritesh Deshmukh, who is Bobby’s younger brother in the movie and Tara Sharma run into the villian police trio led By Rahul Dev. They take him to the police station and beat his life out, literally.
Ritesh does a good job getting the peltings, but thats the only scene where I saw him in the movie so I cant form an opinion about him. Tara goes phobiac witnessing the brutal death of her love. The murder is converted into an encounter death with Ritesh getting framed as a drug trafficker.
The rest is bollywood ishtyle..Bobby goes tracing the death and learning the truth, takes the battle to court. Court justice shows him the middle finger, he goes nuts, does a John Woo-er, kidnapping all the three, and making them to spill the beans in front of a hidden camera, while the entire police force are running around the building not knowing what to do. He hands the cassette to the police, tidies his hair and walks off. We sit gaping at what we saw feeling like an idiot.
The movie was proceeding pretty fine at the point when I started watching it..but it was downhill all the way from there. I think they lost the whole point about the track they wanted to follow. The way, Bobby started off, filing a report, hiring a lawyer and stuff was fine. He was not trying to yell out through the window or glare at the audience as if we were somehow responsible of his woes. Something that his elder brother is pretty fond of doing. Instead Bobby was approaching the problem in a more down-to-earth manner. But that was all that was there to the movie. From there it went to the dogs.
I think bollywood usually moves on two tracks..one is the fairy tale track with designer dress and cars, exotic song locations and lots of melodrama. Sooraj Barjatya is an exponent of these, as well as many others.
If you see the hero hiring an autorickshaw or the heroine wearing lesser mascara, it belongs to the second track. The movie would try (TRY I say not BE) to be more real-life with the dialogues containing heavy doses of local slang, lesser songs and more subtle. They try to apply some cause and effect to all the scenes and usually make up for a good movie.
Bardaasht was more into the latter track, when I started seeing it. But somewhere they lost tracks and started running haywire.
The courtroom scene was pathetic to tell the least. Lara Dutta, his estranged love works as a junior to the corrupt lawyer that Bobby hires. ( When will such coincidences end in bollywood??). They patch up their feelings, while working on the case. As expected she takes up the case and as expected she loses. She was pretty unconvincing, cant blame the judge. Maybe if she had put in some effort to show the judge some eyes and her pretty pretty smiles instead of the weak evidences she had, she might just have pulled it off.
I think the director lost the reins after that. Its almost as if he was also expecting Lara to win the case and was as much startled as we were that she lost. He didnt know where to go from there. So he gets Bobby to kidnap all the three right from the police station, take them to a skyscraper in the heart of the city and get them to vomit the truth.
Think of it..a movie proceeding pretty logically until then. All of a sudden Booby (ok, Bobby!) rushes into the police station, knocks all the police unconscious, gets the trio and takes them to the top floor of a skyscraper in the heart of the city, teeming with people! How he does that is mercifully not shown. He rushes the station and next scene - all three are tied up and in the top floor. Maybe he teleported. Anyhow its good that Niwas had enough sense not to show how Bobby did it. It would have been so much of an insult to our intelligence, I might have tried the same thing with the director, producer and any other person who on the first place told them that this would work.
They should have stuck with either one track..either they should have got Bobby to get into his John Woo boots from the time the movie started and make it a pretty good action movie or they should have kept it mellowed and end it , mayhap, outside the court itself and on the wrong side of law itself, but with a better story essence. Instead they just switched tracks, satisfying audiences of neither track completely.
I read some reviews of the movie..im surprised to see that almost everyone appreciated Bobby’s performance. Well..its different from the normal ones we have seen him in. He just glares and skulks most of the time in this one. But then I think he might have been thinking more about what happens when the movie hits the stands, rather than acting. Everyone else in the cast just put in a luke warm effort, nothing to stand out.
so thats it...good starting, bad proceedings, ugly ending.
Save urself...RUN if u see this in the channels...and whatever happens...DONT LOOK BACK!