If you’re not sure whether to see ’’Kaal’’, and might want to watch ’’Waqt’’, do yourself a favor. Definitely watch ’’Waqt’’ instead. Right after seeing ’’Kaal’’ with some friends, I saw ’’Waqt’’ with them also. It was my second time seeing ’’Waqt’’, and their first time. We all agreed that ’’Waqt’’ is a far superior movie. I think the difference in quality is like the difference between night and day.
I’m a big Karan Johar supporter and (was) a Vivek fan, so I did not come into this biased against ’’Kaal’’. But it’s impossible for me to be positive about this movie.
So what do I think went wrong?
-Bad acting by Vivek Vivek in ’’Kaal’’ is so bad that it has singlehandedly dropped my perception of Vivek’s acting from ’’tied for second in my Top Ten favorite actors’’ to ’’out of the Top Ten’’. At various dramatic points of the movie, Vivek makes these demented expressions with his eyes and stares intensely out of the corner of his eyes at people, then darts his eyes back and forth ... Horrid, like something out of a cartoon. I couldn’t help but laugh at some dramatic or scary scenes, when I noticed this. Can you believe it -- me laughing at Vivek?
The other main actors don’t have much opportunity to act, because their characters are so bland and just go through the motions. Which brings me to problem No. 2:
- Character development -- There was no development. Well, there’s one exception -- there was one character who did end up with a distinctive personality as shown consistently through dialogue and action, and whose fate I was concerned about. This was Vishal, who was played well by a non-star actor.
But the others were pretty much just bland, interchangeable young people, as has been mentioned elsewhere. There was virtually no difference between John and Esha’s ’’National Geographic researcher’’ characters and the other young people, in terms of their knowledge and how they reacted to situations.
At one point, John gave a speech to Esha about putting her first from now on, instead of putting his research first -- a scene apparently meant to move us. But this speech fell completely flat because we hadn’t ever seen John and Esha interacting before in any meaningful way anyway, nor John putting his research first.
Also, Vivek’s character was pretty inconsistent. For instance, he hated smoking, but we then saw him smoking. He was consistent about saying ’’Cut the crap’’ a lot, but that didn’t give more than a one-dimensional image of his character.
Overall, the lack of character development meant that I did not care about what happened to the characters, and was completely emotionally disconnected from the movie.
- Songs -- The item numbers didn’t work, and there should have been other songs too.
The opening item song was a disaster. The choreography was bland, and SRK looked tired.
The song at the end was great, but too late to rescue the movie.
What I really want to say, though, about songs, is that this idea that songs were ’’unneeded in the narrative’’ is cliched but wrong in my opinion. Kaal would have been drastically improved if it had had songs.
For one thing, songs could have shown us the depth of love of the romantic pairs, so that we would care about them. Instead, I found myself not caring about the lovers one bit.
Songs could also have been used to introduce characters, especially John Abraham’s character, Krish. (Instead of a song, our introduction to him is that we see him running shirtless after a snake and wrapping it around himself for no apparent reason -- uh, yeah.) Again, this might have made us care more about the character.
Sure these characters could have been developed in other ways -- but failing that, songs could still have helped establish their personalities in our minds. Unfortunately, there were no such songs.
Songs would also have made things more exciting, more thrilling. Moping around in the jungle for two hours and having supposedly scary things happen is really not that scary. The movie needed ’’breaks in the narrative’’ in order to make the scary things more scary. It’s like if you have night all the time, you don’t realize what that means unless you see some light also.
There was also ample opportunity for emotional reflection in songs after characters died. This would not have been intrusive when the next scene in the movie was not going to be scary, but was just going to be Ajay Devgan rambling on and Vivek responding with ’’Cut the crap’’ or ’’What bakwaas’’, anyway. How boring.
- Muddled message The movie’s supposed to be about conservation, isn’t it? But do our characters learn to be more respectful of wildlife? I would say no. They’re just lucky to be alive at the end, that’s that -- no lessons learned. There’s still a lot of prattle about tigers defending their territory, and ’’following the rules’’, but it’s so blah-blah general that as Vivek’s character says often, my reaction is just ’’Cut the crap.’’
This point about the message of conservation being lost, is also related to my next point ...
Dropped plot thread What happened to the idea that the park ranger was allowing poaching? Was anything even done about poaching in the movie?
Poor directing choices? Kaal sort of combines the ’’least appealing individual aspect of Karan Johar movies’’ with the ’’least appealing aspect of Ram Gopal Varma’’ -- Varma’s rather emotionally restricted style, and Karan Johar’s slo-mo dramatic poses. So actors turn to each other, pose, and glare in slow motion, but with no real emotion to back it up. It all looks very cheesy. Or they just look at the camera in slow motion, and pose with a serious or cocky face -- again, very cheesy.
A scene where I thought, ’’This is bad directing, ’’ was when John and Vivek were talking about guns. They focused in and focused out on first John, then Vivek, then John again, etc. -- but why? John and Vivek weren’t saying anything that big or important.
- Basically, just not that scary. I was scared by a nightmare sequence and by a dead body that Esha sees. That was about it -- a grand total of two scary scenes.
Are shots of animals making sounds supposed to be scary? Why should that be scary?
TO END, A COUPLE POSITIVES:
There’s a death scene at a bridge that is moving, sad, and has twists and turns.
The introduction of Vivek, Lara, and two side characters has some appeal. The rapidfire conversation, the humor about the foreign car, and slightly spooky ’’inauspiciousness’’ did make me think for a few minutes that Kaal would have some style.