Tag Archives: Movie Review

Movie Review: NH10 (2015)

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NH10_Poster3.5 Stars (out of 4)

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NH10 is a relentless race for survival that keeps you on the edge of your seat. Anushka Sharma is spellbinding as a woman who fights for her life after her husband makes a costly mistake.

As grim and intense as the movie becomes, its opening scene is charming. The audience is introduced to a married couple, Meera (Sharma) and Arjun (Neil Bhoopalam), as they converse while driving to a party in Delhi. The camera shoots the city at night from the car’s point of view, and we only hear the couple. Through their playful banter, we come to care about them before we even see what an attractive pair they make.

Their conversation reveals benign problems typical of many marriages. She doesn’t want to go to the party, but he does. He habitually forgets his phone in the car. Her job pulls her to the office at all hours.

Yet these modest issues set up the story. Arjun stays late at the party, and Meera drives to her office alone. On the way, she escapes an attempted carjacking. The couple’s subsequent meeting with the police is disheartening. The male officer chides Meera for failing to note the other vehicle’s license number before ceasing to address her entirely. He talks only to Arjun — as if he were her father, not her husband. As in many other Hindi films, the police in NH10 are unwilling to help the people they are supposed to serve and protect.

The attack awakens Meera to the many ways — subtle and overt — that her gender marks her as an “other” in society. It makes her a potential target for criminals. She’s regarded as a child in the eyes of the cop. A male coworker accuses her of receiving preferential treatment. Even when she and Arjun leave town for a vacation, she sees the word “whore” written on the door of a bathroom stall in a roadside restaurant.

As she washes away the offensive word, she’s drawn into the struggle that defines the rest of her journey. A young woman, Pinky, begs Meera for help. Pinky’s brother, Satbir (Darshan Kumaar), and his goons drag the woman and her husband into a car. Arjun tries to intervene, even as Meera begs him not to. Satbir punches Arjun before driving off with Pinky and her groom.

Arjun chases after Satbir’s vehicle, realizing too late that Satbir and his goons are not yokels who will be scared of Arjun’s pistol. Arjun’s act of bravado — born of his feeling of failure for not protecting Meera from the carjackers — dooms them both.

NH10 makes its points about gender in contemporary India with subtlety. The consequences of Arjun’s reaction shine the spotlight on comments made by some politicians in response to highly publicized rape cases (and reinforced in a number of popular movies): women will be safe as long as they have a man around to protect them.

It’s not enough that Arjun is there or that he has a gun. He and Meera are outnumbered by Satbir and his crew, who are far more experienced in violent behavior than the married couple. More importantly, the situation would have been exactly the same had Arjun been with Meera on the night she was attacked: outnumbered by violent people. What could any man do to protect his loved one in the face of such odds?

The futility of Arjun’s situation is emphasized by Bhoopalam’s depiction of him as a truly ordinary guy. Nice, but neither a sap nor morally perfect. Fit, but not a superman. He’s just a guy.

Meera begins as a similarly ordinary woman, but she endures more emotional extremes. Sharma guides her through terror, exhaustion, frustration, despair, and rage. It’s a career-defining performance that reaches its high point in the movie’s chilling climax.

Meera and Arjun spend much of the film running through the desert at night to avoid their adversaries, and the lighting throughout is terrific. It’s always easy to see the couple onscreen while being able to appreciate their own limited field of vision. The sound design is likewise great for enhancing the sense of danger without becoming cartoonish. Rather than a cheesy musical flourish, a car engine that’s a little too loud is more than enough to make you jump from your seat.

If anything, NH10 is a little too good at creating tension. Meera never gets a break, so neither does the audience. Even with a runtime of under two hours, it’s exhausting.

Nevertheless, NH10 is a movie worth watching for those who aren’t squeamish. Sharma shows that she’s more than up to the task of anchoring a film that succeeds or fails on her merits. Her performance alone makes NH10 a must-see movie.

[Update: Reflecting further on the NH10, I want to commend the filmmakers for avoiding a trope too common in Hindi films: none of the female characters are threatened with rape. The threat of rape is often used against women in movies, without regard to its particular gender significance. Its omission is obviously a deliberate choice, and a positive one at that.]

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Movie Review: Alone (2015)

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Alone3 Stars (out of 4)

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A horror movie starring Bipasha Basu (or anyone, for that matter) as a pair of conjoined twins sounds like a recipe for disaster. But Alone is creepy, well-paced, and far better than one would expect it to be.

Basu plays Sanjana, the surviving member of a pair of identical twins once joined at the waist. Her deceased sister, Anjana (also Basu, in flashbacks), wore glasses, making it possible to tell the two apart.

Sanjana’s marriage to Kabir (Karan Singh Grover) is suffering due to her co-dependence. Her survivor’s guilt led them to flee her family home in Kerala. When her mother is seriously injured in a suspicious accident, Sanjana and Kabir return to the home haunted by memories of Anjana. But is it just Anjana’s memory haunting the place, or Anjana herself?

The married couple shares a complicated dynamic. Who can blame Sanjana for having emotional issues, considering her mother’s present ill health and her unresolved guilt about her sister’s death? Apparently Kabir can. He’s unsympathetic toward his wife, which is shocking given that he’s known the twins since childhood and should be able to understand their unique bond.

It’s only after a psychologist, Dr. Namit (Zakir Hussain), tells him to stop being such a jerk that Kabir starts treating his wife with the understanding she deserves. Kabir’s early bad behavior only looks worse when he and the doctor finally see proof that Sanjana’s troubles aren’t all in her mind; her sister’s spirit really is out to kill her.

Alone‘s plot has a lot of twists and turns, appropriately mirroring Sanjana’s disturbed mental state. Any confusion as to why events proceed the way they do is resolved in satisfying fashion by the story’s end. The clever way the tale is told looks even better upon further reflection.

The acting is uneven, partly due to the way the characters are written. There’s only so much Grover can do to make a jerk like Kabir appealing. Basu struggles initially to make scared, fragile Sanjana relatable, but her character evolves as the movie proceeds, culminating in a fun, crazy climax. The two attractive leads share a steamy chemistry during the film’s love scenes.

For a Hindi movie, Alone is fairly scary, without resorting to gross visuals or gore. The large, dark house sets a spooky mood where one can easily imagine seeing things moving about in the night. The movie doesn’t shy away from jump scares, and it features some nice misdirection.

I admit, I expected Alone to be more unintentionally funny than anything else. It only is on a couple of occasions, as when Basu has to simulate a poltergeist attack by flinging herself onto the ground and into walls. There is also some not-so-subtle innuendo in the lyrics of a love song sung by a male vocalist: “I’ll trickle drop by drop and stay on your body.”

But Alone dashed my low expectations and delivered a solid horror film. Except for an overly long scene involving a religious ritual, the momentum never flags. The story gets progressively more interesting and complicated, and the payoff is satisfying. It’s an entertaining flick.

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Movie Review: Meena (2012)

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Meena2.5 Stars (out of 4)

Meena is available to watch for free at the film’s website.

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Actress Lucy Liu chose an important subject for her directorial debut, a short film about sex slavery called Meena. However, the film’s abbreviated length forces the omission of critical contextual information.

For starters, the title is misleading. Meena (Tannishtha Chatterjee) isn’t really the main character; her daughter, Naina (Sparsh Khanchandani), is.

Meena Haseena is a real person whose story features in the wonderful book Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. Sold into prostitution at age eight, Meena eventually escaped, leaving behind a daughter who also grew up in a life of sex slavery. After more than a decade, Meena rescued her daughter with the help of a non-governmental organization (NGO) working to liberate victims of human trafficking.

Elements of Meena’s tortured childhood are shown in flashbacks, but much of the action in the twenty-minute-long movie focuses on Naina’s present circumstances. Not yet a teenager, Naina has already developed the survival skills necessary to endure a life of brutalization. She counsels another young prostitute to accept that this is their reality.

Naina’s only clue that someone on the outside is plotting her rescue is a strange woman — whom she doesn’t know is Meena, her mother — who twice storms into the brothel, shouting Naina’s name. On both occasions, Meena leaves after being beaten by the madam’s strongman, Manooj (Vikas Shrivastav).

It’s disappointing to see Chatterjee’s immense talent wasted in such a small role. All she does is scream and get beaten up. When Meena finally succeeds in liberating Naina, we are given no context for how she accomplished the feat. How did she contact the NGO? What planning went into the rescue? Is her life in danger?

As frustrating as the lack of context is, the rescue’s suddenness forces the audience to empathize with Naina. Every adult she’s ever known has abused her. Manooj follows his mock-sympathetic encouragement with a slap. So when a stranger arrives to take her from the only home she’s ever known — as awful as it is — Naina is confused at best, terrified at worst.

Liu spends a lot of time visually emphasizing the horrors of sexual slavery. However, it’s fair to assume that most of the audience already believes it to be horrible. We don’t need to see a flashback of Manooj zipping his fly as gets out of bed after raping eight-year-old Meena.

The scene that most effectively illustrates the gulf between regular folks and the aberrant sexuality of a pedophile is a scene in which Naina and some other girls are trotted out to dance for the customers. The girls wear midriff-baring tops and such garish make-up that they look ridiculous, but the urge to laugh quickly disappears when one realizes that there are real-life perverts who find a child in such attire arousing. The scene hits home without being in any way salacious.

Meena is at its best when it explores the psychology of the women forced into slavery and the conditions that make it hard for them to escape, but the movie simply isn’t long enough to look deeply into such matters. If only Liu had been able to make a feature-length film about the same subject.

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Movie Review: Badlapur (2015)

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Badlapur_Poster3.5 Stars (out of 4)

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Badlapur is a jaw-dropping thriller that examines the perils of revenge. After a pair of delightful comic performances in his two previous films, Varun Dhawan shines as a grieving husband who becomes a monster.

Heed the tagline at the end of the Badlapur trailer: “Don’t miss the beginning.” The movie opens with a bank robbery and carjacking. The owner of the car (played by Yami Gautam) and her young son are killed in gruesome — if somewhat accidental — fashion during the escape attempt. One of the robbers (played by Vinay Pathak) flees with the loot, while the other, Liak (Nawazuddin Siddiqui), turns himself in to the police.

Badlapur‘s plot follows two parallel stories: Liak’s life behind bars, and the quest for revenge undertaken by Raghu (Dhawan), husband of Misha (Gautam) and father of their son.

The movie is clearly inspired by the Korean film I Saw the Devil — most obviously in a scene in which a man in a car pulls up to a stranded female motorist — which was remade in India last year as Ek Villain. Badlapur is a more fitting successor to the Korean film than the acknowledged remake.

What differentiates Badlapur‘s lead character from the secret service agent at the core of I Saw the Devil is that Raghu has no special skills to aid his revenge quest. He works in advertising before the murders, and takes a job as a factory foreman after Liak is imprisoned.

Because he’s just a regular guy, Raghu’s plans seem a little disorganized. It’s not clear when he will feel his vengeance complete. He intends to wait until Liak’s twenty-year prison sentence is over, then follow Liak when he retrieves his share of the money from Harman (Pathak), his accomplice. Raghu’s timetable is accelerated when a well-meaning-but-naive charity worker, Shoba (Divya Dutta), asks Raghu to petition for Liak’s early release so he can seek medical treatment.

Raghu is content to wait to enact his revenge upon Liak and Harman, but he has far less patience for the women who willingly maintain relationships with the criminals. This goes for Shoba, Harman’s wife, Koko (Radhika Apte), and especially Liak’s girlfriend, Jimli (Huma Qureshi).

Jimli is first to experience Raghu’s rage. Because she is a prostitute, Raghu has no compunction about raping her, thus “ruining” her for Liak. That Raghu feels his money can compensate Jimli for the rape is the sign that he’s gone off the deep end. When Liak asks him what makes the two of them so different, Raghu doesn’t have a good answer.

Every performance in Badlapur is pitch perfect. Dutta and Apte are sympathetic, and Qureshi is superb. Pathak doesn’t get as much screentime as Siddiqui, but he features in the movie’s best scene, in which Harman and Raghu silently size each other up as they ride in an elevator.

Siddiqui is great, but Liak’s character is tricky to embrace. There’s only so much he can do since he spends much of the film in jail, and every scene reinforces that he’s a bad guy. The volume of storytime devoted to Liak has less to do with the character and more to do with a desire to keep Siddiqui on screen for as long as possible.

In only his fourth film, Dhawan extends his acting range in impressive fashion. His portrayal of Raghu is chilling. He’s far scarier than Liak or Harman, but he also has the capacity to act normal when it serves his purpose.

Badlapur has trouble maintaining momentum early on. Raghu’s brutalization of Jimli is followed by flashbacks to his romance with Misha and low-key scenes of Liak’s exploits in jail. Raghu feels a bit absent from the film’s ultimate resolution, but perhaps that fits given that he isn’t a criminal mastermind capable of engineering a dramatic climax.

One thing director Sriram Raghavan excels at is sound design. There isn’t much in the way of background music in Badlapur, and the movie is often punctuated by street noise like barking dogs. The undercurrent of everyday sounds makes the film feel more realistic, heightening its impact.

Not a movie for the faint of heart, Badlapur rewards its audience with great performances and a nuanced take on the revenge genre. If nothing else, it establishes Varun Dhawan as the most exciting young actor in Bollywood today.

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Movie Review: Roy (2015)

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Roy_film_poster1 Star (out of 4)

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Roy is full of so much talking and so little action that it should have been an audiobook instead of a movie. Then again, with such dull dialogue, who would listen to it?

Arjun Rampal plays Kabir, a celebrity film director. Kabir is the kind of narcissistic jerk who stomps out his cigarette butts on the floor of a hotel hallway and who uses a manual typewriter while flying on a plane.

After the success of Guns and Guns 2, Kabir is stymied by writer’s block while working on Guns 3. The first fifteen minutes of Roy consist of shots of Kabir sitting idly in front of the typewriter, brushing his teeth, feeding his fish, and fending off the concerned inquiries of his excessively patient producer, Meera (Shernaz Patel).

In the world of Roy, news reports consist entirely of details of Kabir’s romantic life and reports of art theft. A TV report about a painting stolen in Malaysia prompts Kabir to take his crew there to film Guns 3. There, Kabir becomes smitten with an independent movie director, Ayesha (Jacqueline Fernandez).

[Correction: In addition to art theft and Kabir’s romantic life, news reports in Roy also feature extensive coverage of indie film festivals. Just like real life.]

Kabir casts an actress who looks exactly like Ayesha to play the romantic interest in Guns 3, opposite his protagonist, Roy (Ranbir Kapoor). There is absolutely no explanation offered for Ayesha’s doppelgänger.

Action — such as it is — switches between Kabir and Ayesha in the real world and Roy and the lookalike, Tia, in the movie world of Guns. Both worlds are dominated by boring, pseudo-intellectual conversations, punctuated by languid song montages in which people drive around in cars or Roy rides a motorcycle.

Given that Kabir is an emotionally stunted pre-teen trapped in a 40-year-old body, nothing he or Roy says on the nature of being contains any kind of insight. There’s so much undirected angst in the dialogue, it’s like it was written by the guys from the ’90s band Bush.

An excess of ennui in their characters yields clunky, detached performances by Rampal and Kapoor. Fernandez — whose beauty is the best thing Roy has going for it — is better in scenes as Tia, in which she plays an heiress trapped in a 1960s time warp, at least as far as her teased hair is concerned.

Debutant writer-director Vikramjit Singh has a good sense for framing shots, and the movie is quite pretty. Sadly, the visual interest ends there, since Singh focuses all his attention on writing bland dialogue instead of considering what it would look like when delivered onscreen.

Without additional assistance on the script, Singh’s story feels hollow. Even after Kabir undergoes his supposed metamorphosis from spoiled man-child to emotionally mature adult, he still does something incredibly selfish.

Ayesha is on her way to a film festival in another country. For independent filmmakers, festivals provide opportunities to network and drum up publicity and funds for their next projects. Wealthy, connected Kabir stops Ayesha at the airport, telling her, in essence, “If you love me, you won’t get on the plane.”

Kabir puts his own desires ahead of Ayesha’s career, which is all the more selfish since Kabir’s got more than enough cash to buy his own plane ticket and go with her. Considering that Singh’s debut film features A-listers like Kapoor, Rampal, and Fernandez, it’s not surprising that he has an easier time identifying with a celebrity like Kabir rather than a struggling filmmaker like Ayesha.

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Movie Review: Shamitabh (2015)

ShamithahfilmZero Stars (out of 4)

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For all but a few of Shamitabh‘s two hours and thirty minutes, I wished I was anyplace other than the theater. I would spare you that same pain.

The element of Shamitabh that should’ve precluded it from ever being made is its asinine premise. Dhanush plays Danish — all three leads play characters with variations of their own names — a mute, small-town guy who wants to be an actor. He fails to break into the Mumbai film industry until a sympathetic assistant director, Akshara (Akshara Haasan), takes him under her wing. Akshara’s father is a doctor whose colleagues in Finland have created a revolutionary technology to aid mute people.

The technology involves implanting a chip in the patient’s throat that acts as a receiver. When words are spoken aloud by someone wearing a connected earpiece/microphone, the sound comes out of the mouth of mute patient when he moves his lips. In essence, the technology turns a mute person into a living ventriloquist’s dummy.

This invention is idiotic. Why would a mute person want to speak if he always had to do so in someone else’s voice, never able to speak his own thoughts? Who would want to be the person permanently tethered to mute person, effectively rendered mute themselves for the sake of someone else?

Somehow, Danish becomes a superstar actor after he hires Amitabh (Amitabh Bachchan) — a drunk with a great baritone — to supply his voice while making movies. No one on the movie set wonders why a 30-year-old guy sounds like a man in his 70s.

The sheer stupidity of the premise is reason enough to avoid Shamitabh, but there are many other reasons to dislike it as well. Writer-director R. Balki clearly intends for Shamitabh to be an exploration of the actor’s craft and filmmaking in general. The stupid premise might have worked as a satire, but Balki’s Shamitabh is a straightforward wannabe tear-jerker that provides no insight on its subject matter.

For a movie about filmmaking, there’s a distinct absence of craft in Shamitabh. Shots are framed awkwardly. Transitions are jerky. The editing is poor. Scenes are too long. A romance scene between Danish and an actress is totally out-of-place. The dialogue is too on the nose.

More distracting than any of these flaws is the movie’s music. The songs are horrible, but the incidental music is downright clownish. Any emotional moment is punctuated with garish musical cues so amateurish that it’s hard to believe that this is Balki’s third film.

Perhaps the greatest indictment of a film that’s supposed to be about actors is that the acting is terrible. Dhanush’s movements are exaggerated to a ridiculous degree, as though his body is rebelling against the fact that he can’t talk. Akshara’s facial expressions are bizarre, and she delivers her dialogue in either a monotone or hysterical screaming. She needed better direction in her debut film.

There are moments when the legendary Bachchan shows his skill, in subtle reactions to some ridiculous request by Danish. But Bachchan gives a number of excessive monologues that would be tiresome no matter who delivered them, and they destroy the flow of the film.

Watching Shamitabh is a uniquely painful movie-going experience that should be avoided at all costs.

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Movie Review: Hawaizaada (2015)

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Hawaizaada3 Stars (out of 4)

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Director Vibhu Puri makes a promising debut with Hawaizaada (“Free Flying”, according to the English subtitles), a historical fantasy about an Indian inventor who built an airplane eight years before the Wright brothers.

Legend has it that, in 1895, an unmanned aircraft built by Shivkar Bapuji Talpade flew for several minutes, though scant evidence exists to prove the story. A note at the start of Hawaizaada clarifies that the film is not biographical, but merely inspired by Talpade.

The truth of the legend isn’t as important to Hawaizaada as what it represents: hope. England ruled India during Talpade’s lifetime, a fact that the movie suggests as a possible explanation for why so little information remains regarding his experiments. If the world learned that an Indian independently built a flying machine, the British could have no longer justified their occupation by claiming that Indians were uneducated primitives in need of their civilizing oversight.

Ayushmann Khurrana plays “Shivy” Talpade, the clever but aimless son of a well-to-do Mumbai family. When his father throws him out of the house, Shivy moves in with Shastry (Mithun Chakraborty), an eccentric inventor who looks like a bespectacled Mark Twain. Shastry makes Shivy his apprentice, and they start building an airplane.

Shastry’s home is a wonder. He lives aboard a beached ship, cluttered with Rube Goldberg machines and models of his various inventions. The models — and the plane he and Shivy eventually build — have a cool steampunk aesthetic. There are dozens of birdcages, housing the pigeons whose flight patterns he studies.

The houseboat is but one amazing set in a great-looking film. Every location is full of detail, whether it’s a bedroom full of mirrors or a simple village street. Puri — who served as an assistant director on Saawariya and The Blue Umbrella, two visually sumptuous films — stamps his vision on every scene, right down to the richly colored costumes.

In addition to Shivy’s disapproving father and some suspicious British officers, the other wrinkle in his life is Sitara (Pallavi Sharda), a dancing girl with whom Shivy has fallen in love. She’s realistic about the infeasibility of their relationship, given their difference in social standing. But Shivy is both a romantic and a reformer, ever hopeful that love can conquer all.

Khurrana and Sharda make a likeable pair, with her playing the film’s most grounded character. Some of the acting is occasionally hammy, with Chakraborty the main offender.

A number of helpful characters fill out the story, including Shivy’s nephew/sidekick, Narayan (the adorable Naman Jain), and his old band leader, Khan (Jameel Khan).

Some of Shivy’s most ardent cheerleaders are women. Not only does he have Sitara in his corner, but also his sister-in-law and the wife of a local lord. The women know that Shivy’s success would strike a blow against both the British and the wealthy Indian men aligned with them. A new era of change — heralded by an airplane’s flight — could mean more opportunities for women.

Hawaizaada has a packed soundtrack, with some great songs. “Dil-e-Nadaan,” sung by Khurrana, is a standout. But a few songs feel like filler, stretching out a movie that’s already longer than it needs to be.

International audience members may find one plot thread confusing. Shivy and Shastry take some of their clues on airplane design from the Vedas, and they occasionally quote scripture that isn’t translated in the English subtitles. It’s not vital in order to follow the plot, but one does feel a bit left out.

Go watch Hawaizaada. Not only is it an uplifting story, but it’s a chance to experience the work an emerging director with a distinct aesthetic point of view. I want to see what Vibhu Puri does next.

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Movie Review: Dolly Ki Doli (2015)

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DollyKiDoli1 Star (out of 4)

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Was footage accidentally left out of Dolly Ki Doli? That’s the only way to account for a climax and resolution that come completely out of left field.

Sonam Kapoor plays Dolly, “The Plundering Bride” as she’s known by the police. She flits around the outskirts of Delhi, marrying eligible bachelors and drugging and robbing them on their wedding night. She arranges marriages with men of various religions and traditions, requiring her to change her appearance and mannerisms to appeal to each family she’s marrying into.

Dolly is a seductress only in a fantasy sense. She never so much as allows her grooms to kiss her, delaying their affection with excuses* until the drugs she’s administered have taken effect.

While Dolly’s swindled grooms — including nouveau riche braggart Sonu (Rajkummar Rao) and horny loser Manjot (Varun Sharma) — are jerks, so is she. Dolly works with a group of fellow cons who pose as her family, and her fake brother, Raju (Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub), is in love with her. Dolly knows this, and she ridicules Raju for it.

Dolly’s pride derails their criminal enterprise. After being rejected as a prospective bride by Manjot’s mother for being too tall, Dolly insists on pursuing Manjot in order to take revenge on his family. This mistake lands her in the clutches of police officer Robin Singh (Pulkit Samrat), who has his own reasons for pursuing Dolly. The history between Robin and Dolly isn’t developed enough for the film’s final act to feel remotely believable.

While Kapoor imbues Dolly with a fun vibe, that’s the thief’s only positive attribute. She lacks chemistry with her potential beaus, and she lacks character depth. Dolly says that she’s a thief because she’s good at it. That’s a valid enough reason, but the movie gives no sense of what ambitions Dolly has for her future, when she can no longer keep up the con.

I’m still not sold on the acting abilities of Samrat and Sharma, who got their big breaks in 2013’s Fukrey. Ayyub is earnest as lovelorn Raju, but the script gives his character no room to grow.

What Dolly Ki Doli does show is what a terrific actor Rajkummar Rao is. Sonu tracks down Dolly not for revenge but because he genuinely loves her. He stares at her with such devotion and longing that one secretly hopes Dolly will return to him. It’s a quality performance that deserved a better film.

* – I’d like to thank Dolly Ki Doli‘s subtitles for me teaching me a nauseating euphemism for menstruation I’d never heard before. When Dolly puts off one of her grooms by saying she’s having “ladki problems” (“girl problems”), the subtitles read, “I’m chumming.”

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Movie Review: Baby (2015)

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BABY_poster_20152.5 Stars (out of 4)

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A lot happens in Baby, but that’s not necessarily a good thing. A choppy story structure and underdeveloped characters make Baby feel like a TV mini-series shoehorned into movie format.

Writer-director Neeraj Pandey’s broad vision pays dividends in certain ways. Globetrotting Indian counter-terrorist operative Ajay (Akshay Kumar) follows his targets to visually interesting places like Turkey, Nepal, and Saudi Arabia. Ajay’s luckier than his poor boss, Feroz (Danny Denzongpa), who only appears in scenes set in office buildings.

Ajay’s first mission — in which he tracks a rogue special agent to Istanbul — starts the movie on a promising note. Ajay extracts enough information to thwart a bomb blast, and the rogue operative foreshadows future attacks before killing himself.

The attacks are the work of a radical Muslim cleric in Pakistan, Maulana Mohammed Rahman (Rasheed Naz). Ajay must disrupt Maulana’s network — which includes a local recruiter, a jailed militant (Kay Kay Menon), and a corrupt businessman (Sushant Singh) — to get to Maulana.

What makes the plot so jarring is that Ajay’s participation is the only connecting thread between operations. (Feroz coordinates the missions, but he never gets to leave his office.) Ajay is alone on his first mission in Turkey, while his subordinate, Jai (Rana Daggubati), foils the bomb plot in India. New flunkies join Ajay for his next mission, and he gets a female sidekick, Shabana (Taapsee Pannu), for the mission after that. It’s only after the militant escapes from jail that Jai reenters the story, after an absence in real-time of over an hour.

Segmenting the story this way keeps Ajay from forging strong connections with his people, thereby lowering the stakes. Would Ajay care if Jai died? It’s not like Jai is his partner or a trusted friend. He’s just a guy who shows up when called on and disappears when he’s not needed.

Worse still is Ajay’s forced family narrative. He shares two scenes early on with his wife (Madhurima Tuli) and two kids, but the kids are never seen again after that. The wife — whatever her name is — reappears for a spy-movie cliché scene, in which she calls to reminds him about their daughter’s birthday while he’s in the middle of frisking a suspect.

It’s another example of the low stakes for Ajay. His family is never endangered by his job, and he hardly thinks about them. In fact, he’s rarely in any real danger at all. The terrorists don’t realize he’s onto them, so they go about their business until he shows up. If they were tracking him in return, it would’ve raised the tension.

The movie’s lengthy 150-minute runtime also keeps Baby from being a truly thrilling thriller. Though effective early on, Pandey employees the same tension-building camerawork patterns repeatedly, making scenes that should be intense predictable.

Kumar is well-suited to anchor this kind of film. He plays the role straight, allowing Anupam Kher to lighten the mood as a reluctant hacker. Kumar also cedes the movie’s most exciting fight scene to Pannu, who is terrific in her minor role.

Despite the film’s bloated runtime, its villains are woefully underdeveloped. Menon’s character doesn’t have any dialogue after his opening scene, which is a shame given some great non-verbal acting he does during his character’s escape from prison. The cleric Maulana spouts some ideology early on but is likewise mute for most of the rest of the movie.

The silent villains may be a deliberate choice on Pandey’s part. De-emphasizing the terrorist’s ideology brings to the forefront a political opinion expressed by both Feroz and Ajay. Feroz explains to the Prime Minister that, when young Indian Muslims choose to fight for Pakistan, it’s India’s fault for making them feel unwelcome in their own country. That inclusive sentiment is one that any government that values diversity should take to heart.

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Movie Review: Creature 3D (2014)

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creature2.5 Stars (out of 4)

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Hindi horror movies are few and far between, and monster movies are rarer still. Taking into consideration the largely nonexistent infrastructure of screenwriters, directors, and visual effects artists that specialize in monster movies, my expectations for Creature 3D were low. While it lived down to my expectations, Creature 3D is so bad, it’s good.

Here’s an example of how Creature 3D qualifies for “so bad, it’s good” status: the humanoid monster’s roar is literally a guy saying, “Roar.” Not making a roar sound, but saying the word, “Roar.”

The creature’s victims are primarily guests and employees of the Glendale Forest Hotel, a place that sounds more like a rehab clinic than a mountain resort, according to my brother (with whom I watched the film). The hotel belongs to Ahana (Bipasha Basu), who left Delhi following her father’s death. Her hopes of a fresh start in the hinterlands are dashed when a monster starts eating her clients.

The monster also interrupts a budding romance between Ahana and Kunal (Imran Abbas), one of her guests. Kunal is supposedly a famous author, but he gets mysterious phone calls asking if he’s done what he came to the hotel to do.

Do Kunal’s mysterious phone calls or the events that drove Ahana from the city have any connection to the creature? No. Unlike American horror movies in which a supernatural attack is often a response to a sin committed — why do you think the teens making out in a car are always first to die? — Ahana’s encounter with the creature is just a case of bad luck. So says Professor Sadanand (Mukul Dev), a zoologist familiar with the creature.

If there’s a moral to the story, it’s that one can’t run from one’s problems. However, the problems that drove Ahana from the city aren’t the kind that can be fought. She’s just grieving her dead dad. Kunal guilt-trips Ahana for taking anti-anxiety medication, which he considers a moral weakness.

Ultimately, Ahana decides to stay and fight the creature, because there wouldn’t be a second half of the movie if she didn’t.

As for the hybrid man-lizard creature itself, oh, boy. It’s entirely computer generated, so it lacks the physical presence of a man in a suit or even a puppet. Some of its movements are neat, but it feels fake and never scary.

In fact, it’s almost like writer-director Vikram Bhatt — who probably has more experience with the horror genre than anyone else presently working in Hindi cinema — went out of his way to make Creature 3D not scary. There isn’t a single frightening moment in the film.

There’s no payoff in scenes where you expect a jump scare. When Ahana and Kunal stand in front of a window, the creature doesn’t pop up on the other side of the glass. Instead, the camera cuts to a window on the other side of the room, and we see the creature’s hand reach over the windowsill before he slowly pulls himself over it. Several shots are just pans across a blank wall with growling sounds in the background that end with the monster coming into the room through an open door.

Far scarier than the monster is Kunal, who spends the bulk of the movie leering at Ahana. One of the film’s song sequences — “Hum Na Rahein Hum” —  is just Kunal staring at Ahana while she goes about her day. Whether she’s buying flowers or driving through the woods, he’s always lurking. I’ve included a link to the hilarious music video below the review.

Mukul Dev is the real hero of the film, providing most of the unintentional comedy. Even though the professor saves a dining room full of people by scaring the monster with fire, his elaborate plan to kill the creature doesn’t involve flames. Instead, it requires “an old bus” and a human dummy covered in meat.

When that plan doesn’t work, the professor must rescue Ahana and Kunal using — you guessed it — fire. This sets up the single greatest shot in the whole film. Instead of soaking his jacket in gasoline, running to the old bus, setting the jacket on fire, and throwing it into the bus to give Ahana and Kunal a chance to escape, Professor Sadanand lights the jacket on fire first and then starts running. The sight of Mukul Dev running down the road trying not to get burned by his flaming sport coat is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen.

Despite a tremendously boring final twenty minutes, there are abundant reasons to watch Creature 3D: Kunal lurking seductively in the woods. The creature’s “roar.” Mukul Dev’s flaming sport coat. Meat dummy.

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