NOTE: This review is on Mumbai Xpress Tamil version.
Kamal hasan’s recent festive offering is Mumbai Xpress, a comedy venture.Kamal has done some brilliant comedy films earlier with Crazy Mohan accompanying him for dialogues and screenplay but this time Kamal does it all alone without Crazy Mohan, the story , screenplay and dialogues are by Kamal, and Singeetham Srinivasa Rao lends his name in the title cards as director.
Mumbai Xpress is a story of confusions, misunderstandings and plans going berserk, the typical ingredients of a comedy film.Three men code named A, B and C plan to kidnap a rich Chettiar’s son for ransom.But they end up getting injured one after the other, so they bring in a multi-talented (?), deaf Avinashi aka Mumbai Xpress (Kamal) for helping them carry out their plan.As expected the plan goes haywire and they end up kidnapping the wrong boy, the son of Manisha Koirala who has illegitimate relationship with ACP Nassar.Unfortunately it’s not just their plans but the script too goes haywire after this point making the ride a lot bumpy.
Kamal has come up with the right ingredients for a real comic treat, but many things has gone wrong in his cooking process , so the end product looks pretty much half-baked.The very core point of the movie, the plan to kidnap the Chettiar’s son using a crane etc, by itself looks terribly contrived, and as if that is not enough, the movie thereafter runs amok, derailing and distancing itself from plausibility.So it just becomes a kind of senseless fantasy comic journey.The situations and the intentions of the characters aren’t that grounded, so somehow one feels totally detached from the narrative.The sudden fatherly affection of Avinashi towards the boy and his love towards Manisha are contrived to the core, so they fail miserably to do anything to the emotional dimension of the film.The situations can be comical only if you have your characters fully justified and the script’s flow spontaneous, but here everything seems forced, so the movie rarely evokes a hearty laugh, but here and there it just tries to tickle us.
Kamal looks terribly tired in the movie, and somehow he lacks that punch to make us laugh unlike his previous ventures. Manisha looks jaded and plastic and literally hams all through the movie.Other supporting actors like Pasupathi, Nassar, Santhana Bharathy have done their job convincingly, the little boy is just OK.It is said that the movie was shot in digital format and then was converted to the normal format, anyway the visuals leave a lot to be desired.The so-called graphics used in the movie looks pretty much silly, pulling the movie even more down.And one understands that Mumbai Xpress has suffered the same fate of Rajini’s ’Baba’, ..there it was Rahman sitting in London doing Bombay Dreams, here it’s IR in hungary busy with his TIS, so except ’Poo Poothadhu’ all the tracks don’t really bear the stamp of the Maestro, but the worst disappointment is the background score which sounds inappropriate for most part of the movie, and at times it’s terribly loud testing our ear drums.
On the whole Mumbai Xpress is nowhere near to Kamal’s earlier ventures like ’Avvai Shanmughi’, ’Panjathanthiram’, which were solid laugh riots.Xpress derails almost the moment it starts its journey and never gets back to the track, it just runs relentlessly on bumpy lands only to halt abruptly.