Haven’t we had an overdose of movies based on religious fanaticism and associated terrorism already? May be not…Okay, haven’t we had more than our share of stories told in the same mundane fashion? I say enough already!
First credit where it’s due. The base story is not bad at all. It has its interesting plot-twists. The sub-plots sort-of flowed into each other too!! The other thing that I enjoyed was the music. Unfortunately, this list stops here.
The battle is completely lost in the filling-in of the details. The characters cannot be called underdeveloped, but they are unbelievably one-dimensional. One character is just shot out of the plot just about when his character could have done something interesting. It is hard to digest when a character behaves the exact same way when he is being friendly with someone and when a close relative passes away. Even if he is the modern-day Gandhi. How can one be speechlessly grieving in shock in one moment and lecturing on tolerance in the other.
Almost each character spieling out speech after speech on either tolerance or intolerance, doesn’t help either. Each lecture consists of the same old, mind-numbing lines. Each line being repeated begs us to be thankful if they are two different sentences saying the same thing. Because at other times, the same words are repeated - asking us to be sympathetic towards the dialogue writer for being creatively-challenged. And one character who certainly shouldn’t have been encouraged was the “poet” grandfather figure. The lyrics were just inane, sir, let alone inspirational.
Anil Kapoor certainly has a wider range of expressions than this. Anurag Sinha again, has a great voice but a very monotonous style of delivering dialogues. Shefali Chaya should be admired for trying her best to maintain composure while playing a rather loud character. I would still blame the character development for the lackluster performances. They had a very good reason to pick a tone and stick to it - the script has no variation in their character!
There is one redeeming factor in this whole set-up - we have seen much, much worse from Subhash Ghai
- Meetu, a part of the audience
