Well, I never thought I would get to write this. I mean, how often does one get an opportunity to vent his frustration for having wasted three hours of his life which he will never get back.
I am talking about the movie Drona.Since it is an year old movie, I will reveal the plot (or whatever you might want to call it).
Adi is a young boy who is being brought up by his foster parents. His foster mother is a cruel lady and so is his brother. Sounds familiar? Well, any similarity to Harry Potter is purely coincidental and unintentional. His foster father, a relatively milder man, keeps reminding Adi the kid that he is very special, but doesn’t seem to be at liberty to elaborate. And so Adi grows up, an underprivileged child in an Indian family in Prague (don’t ask me “why Prague”).
He grows up to be Abhishek, a nervous young man who is pretty lost in just about every way you can think of. Gets in trouble one day, and is saved by Sonia (Priyanka Chopra) zooming in in a gleaming yellow Alfa Romeo sports car. And now he is told - he is Drona, and for thousands of years, his forefathers have been entrusted the responsibility of protecting the Nectar of Immortality which was churned out by the Devas and Asuras during the famous mythological Samudra Manthan. His father was killed by the evil magician Riz Raizada (Kay Kay in his most irritating role so far) by deceit.
Adi / Drona gets to meet his mother, who convinces him of his lineage but shortly after, she is converted into a statue (the statue is perhaps the only neat thing in this movie) by the evil Riz, and it’s already interval. Our hero has still not mustered up enough strength to do anything meaningful, and we hope and pray that post-intermission will be something more action-oriented. However, we realise that Drona and his protector Sonia have still a lot to unravel and the movie keeps attempting to take you from one fantasy scene to another. We limp gradually to the climax where the fight between good versus bad takes place, and this fight is another disappointment for the audience (at least those that are still in the movie hall).
The movie borrows from so many Hollywood movies that you run out of fingers counting the movies – the basic plot is from Phantom (ok, these are comics, though later made into a movie), the troubled childhood from Harry Potter, the cloned Ringwraiths from Lord of the Rings, the stone bridge that suddenly appears from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade…I could go on. All these borrowed scenes are patched together so clumsily that the movie never flows through seamlessly. The special effects (so essential for fantasy movies) are so tacky; the movie looks like it was made half a century ago.
The character of Drona, who is supposed to be strong enough to protect the Nectar, doesn’t find his strength till almost the movie is over, and even at that time, its too little too late. He almost loses the battle to the villain, and its only a brief moment of strength that he exhibits (rather unconvincingly) that turns things right. Abhishek is an actor known for intensity, but not the best person to be seen riding horses and doing scenes which demand energy and athleticism. And so, whatever little action that we do see, is way too ordinary. Romantic scenes between Adi and Sonia are randomly thrown in between action sequences.
The basic plot of the movie had excellent potential to be made into a fantasy movie but director Goldie Behl got all the pieces jumbled up to come out with this most unpalatable Behl-puri.