Tag Archives: Movie Review

Movie Review: Bbuddah…Hoga Terra Baap (2011)

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2 Stars (out of 4)

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Amitabh Bachchan built his reputation as an action star in the ’70s, the types of characters he played earning him the nickname the “Angry Young Man.” Now in his late-sixties, Bbuddah…Hoga Terra Baap presents Bachchan as the angry old man.

Bachchan plays Vijju, an assassin hired by the mafia to murder Karan (Sonu Sood), a police chief determined to rid Mumbai of organized crime. In between two failed attempts on Karan’s life, Vijju befriends a young woman named Amrita (Charmy Kaur), best friend of Karan’s beloved, Tanya (Sonal Chauhan). Vijju humiliates Karan publicly for his mistreatment of Tanya. This can’t be the behavior of a seasoned assassin, can it?

From the second Vijju appears onscreen, it’s clear that this is Bachchan’s movie. He saunters through a busy airport, clad in a white suit with a colorful scarf wrapped around his neck. Vijju threatens a customs agent who draws attention to his age in front of a group of pretty girls. The agent gets off more lightly than anyone else in the movie who dares call Vijju buddah (“old man”).

The filmmakers go so far as to include a thank you note to Bachchan at the end of the film, as if appearing was a favor on Bachchan’s part, and not just another acting job.

Such narrow focus leaves the characters surrounding Bachchan woefully underdeveloped, and none of them makes even a hint of emotional progress as the story develops. Amrita is annoying, and Tanya is pouty and childish. Chauhan’s beauty aside, there’s nothing appealing about Tanya as a romantic lead.

Karan is problematic in that he’s supposed to be one of the good guys, and yet he’s as brutal as the gangsters he wants to drive from the city. He tortures prisoners, stalks Tanya and doesn’t hesitate to put innocent citizens in harm’s way for the sake of a shootout.

There’s an irritating sideplot involving Amrita’s mother, Kamini (Raveena Tandon), who was once in love with Vijju. It’s introduced abruptly, adds nothing to the story and is dropped without resolution.

Bachchan himself is as reliable as ever. He’s exciting to watch during the action scenes, and clever and charming the rest of the time. It’s too bad the rest of the film doesn’t live up to his compelling performance. Rather than creating a film specifically to pay tribute to Bachchan, director Puri Jagannadh would’ve been better off writing a solid movie, casting the superstar and letting him elevate it the way he so often does.

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Movie Review: Always Kabhi Kabhi (2011)

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2 Stars (out of 4)

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Always Kabhi Kabhi (“Always Sometimes Sometimes”) is one of the rare Hindi movies that specifically targets a teenage audience. Perhaps that rarity has something to do with the fact that most teen movies are pretty much the same, and Always Kabhi Kabhi is no different.

The many similarities in teen movies have to do with the similarities in the lives of teenagers — particularly middle-class teens — across the globe. Academic pressures, tested friendships, budding romances and family friction are universal.

Those are precisely the problems afflicting the students at St. Mark’s High School, a private school in Delhi. Slacker Sam (Ali Fazal) has the hots for the pretty new girl, Aishwarya (Giselli Monteiro), who’s threatening to steal the spotlight from stubborn Nandy (Zoa Morani). This interpersonal drama plays out to the amusement of Sam’s best bud and Nandy’s nemesis, nerdy Tariq (Satyajeet Dubey).

St. Mark’s hosts a Shakespeare festival, and Sam and Aishwarya land the lead roles in Romeo and Juliet. The whole setup is very High School Musical, complete with several song-and-dance routines. (Producer Shahrukh Khan adds his star power to a number during the closing credits.)

The young lead actors are generally competent, though none stands out as Bollywood’s next big star. Monteiro moved to India from Brazil to play Harleen Kaur in 2009’s Love Aaj Kal, a role with minimal dialog. She gets a few more lines as Ash, but her acting lacks conviction. Perhaps language is still an obstacle for Monteiro.

For American audiences, Always Kabhi Kabhi has some novel cultural differences that could make it more interesting than other teen fare. At a dance club, Sam smokes his first joint. Almost as if the joint were alarmed, the cops immediately swarm the club, and Sam gets busted. The cops bribe him in order to keep the matter from his parents. If only American teens had such an option.

Also, Ash’s mother pushes her to shoot some modeling photos wearing — gasp! — a bikini. Ash looks as though her mother has just sold her in to prostitution. Her reaction is understandable within its cultural context and seems positively quaint compared to the antics of the kids on Jersey Shore.

Every once in a while, it’s refreshing to see a movie that is truly friendly for all audiences. The characters aren’t especially wild (or realistic, for that matter), but their harmlessness shouldn’t be held against them. Always Kabhi Kabhi isn’t profound, but nothing says it has to be.

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Movie Review: Being Cyrus (2005)

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Zero Stars (out of 4)

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Rarely do I wish that an Indian film was longer, given that the majority are nearly two-and-a-half hours long. But Being Cyrus, which runs only 89 minutes, seems far too short to give its damaged characters time to develop. Or maybe the characters and story were poorly conceived to begin with, and no amount of time would’ve allowed them to develop.

The presumptive lead character of the film is the titular Cyrus (Saif Ali Khan), an adult orphan who answers an ad for an artist’s assistant. The artist is Dinshaw Sethna (Naseeruddin Shah), a recluse so stoned that he doesn’t recall placing the ad. Dinshaw’s horny, attention-starved wife, Katy (Dimple Kapadia), insists that Cyrus move in with them and be their errand boy.

Early on, the film relies heavily on Cyrus’ narration (in English) to explain the complex relationships within the Sethna family. The withered patriarch, Fardounjee (Honey Chhaya), lives in squalor under the care of Dinshaw’s cruel and cheap industrialist brother, Farrokh (Boman Irani), and Farrokh’s meek young wife, Tina (Simone Singh). Dinshaw, again, is too stoned to care what’s happening to his dad.

Katy gives Cyrus a stack of cash and sends him to the city to bring treats to poor old Fardounjee. This angers Farrokh. However, Farrokh and Katy are carrying on a romantic affair over the phone. I’m not sure why she’d want to intentionally piss off her beloved, but there’s an awful lot about Being Cyrus that doesn’t make sense.

Following the introduction of an annoying police inspector played by Manoj Pahwa, Cyrus goes on a killing spree before the film culminates in an unforeseeable twist ending. (Damn you, The Usual Suspects, for spawning a generation of inferior twist endings!) There’s no possible way events could’ve been managed to work out the way they did, despite the claims of Cyrus’ accomplice to have controlled everything. There’s not even an attempt at retroactive continuity.

For a twist ending to work, there need to be clues to the ending sprinkled throughout the story. Being Cyrus doesn’t have any of those clues, nor even a narrative thread to speak of. Rather, the film jumps from scene to scene randomly. Most of the notes I wrote while watching the DVD consist of: “How did we get here?” and “Why is this happening?”.

Things would be different if Being Cyrus was a sophisticated or complex movie, but it’s not. It’s the messy first effort of director-screenwriter Homi Adajania, whose debut is light on context and character motivation.

Watching the loathsome, anemic characters of Being Cyrus bumble through the disjointed plot is a grim, unpleasant experience I wouldn’t wish upon anyone, no matter how brief the punishment may be.

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Movie Review: Ready (2011)

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2.5 Stars (out of 4)

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Ready has so much working against it — chiefly, that it’s directed by Anees Bazmee — that I was surprised to enjoy it as much as I did. Its success is due entirely to its stars: Salman Khan and Asin.

Khan plays Prem, a slacker who lives in a giant house with his parents, two of his uncles, and their wives. His family wants him to marry Pooja, an American girl he’s never met or even seen before. At the airport, Prem discusses with one of his uncles his plan to flee before Pooja arrives.

The conversation is overheard by a young woman dressed in full bridal regalia named Sanjana (Asin), who’s just fled her own wedding. She pretends to be Pooja, ready to start married life and turn Prem into a responsible adult. His family is instantly smitten with the fake Pooja, and Prem begins plotting ways to get rid of her.

It’s not long before Prem discovers Sanjana’s true identity. She explains that she’s running from her two feuding gangster uncles, both of whom want to marry her off strategically so as to gain power. Prem takes pity on pretty Sanjana and falls for her. It’s not long before she’s kidnapped by one of her uncles.

Khan’s character, as always for him, is the toughest and smartest guy in the movie. However, instead of relying on his usual bullying bravado,Khan imbues Prem with wit and charm to get what he wants: for Sanjana’s uncles to end their feud and agree to let him marry her. Khan is terrific when he does more than fight his way through a movie, though he gets to do plenty of that in Ready, too.

As good as Khan is, he’s outshone by cute and feisty Asin. Thanks to her, Sanjana is always likeable, even when she’s lying. Her character gets to show the most emotional range, and Asin is more than up to the task.

Prem and Sanjana can’t trick the mafia dons on their own, and they call on Prem’s family for help. Everyone in the family gets a few good lines, spreading the jokes around to make this something of an ensemble film. Paresh Rawal gets a few good lines of his own in the second half of the movie, playing the gangsters’ accountant. Convinced that he has godlike powers, his attempt to animate a statue of a beautiful woman is the best moment in the movie.

The aspects of Ready that don’t work are the same ones that never work in Bazmee’s movies. The movie is too long and with too large a cast, spawning boring sideplots featuring extraneous characters. Bazmee uses scatological humor to get cheap laughs. How cheap? A character stops in the middle of a footchase in order to break wind. No set up or context, just a fart for its own sake. 7-year-old boys will find it hilarious.

In Ready, Bazmee’s bad habits are made manifest in a side story involving one of Sanjana’s cousins, a rude schoolboy named Amar. Prem scares the boy’s rudeness out of him so effectively that the kid pees his pants, as shown in a closeup of the boy’s crotch. Gross.

There’s no need for the side story except to reinforce the moral of the movie: respect your elders. The moral message would make sense if Prem and Sanjana hadn’t spent the entirety of the film tricking and lying to the older members of their families.

The way language is used in the movie could present a problem for audience members who don’t understand Hindi. The English subtitles seem to translate dialog verbatim and don’t capture the flavor of jokes that rely on wordplay. Since that’s the case with so many of the jokes, English-only audience members miss out on much of the fun.

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Movie Review: Turning 30 (2011)

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Zero Stars (out of 4)

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Writer-director Alankrita Shrivastava wanted her debut film Turning 30 to portray young, urban Indian women in a fun yet realistic way. I hope Shrivastava’s portrayal is inaccurate, because the female characters in Turning 30 are pitiable.

Days before her 30th birthday, Naina (Gul Panag) seems to have an ideal life: a house, a good job at an ad agency and a boyfriend, Rishabh (Sid Makkar), who’s ready to propose. When Naina’s ideas are stolen at work and Rishabh abruptly breaks up with her, Naina falls apart.

This is a fine set up for a story, but a set up is all it should be. Instead, Naina’s despair over her unsettled life is the story of Turning 30. Any time she sees or thinks about Rishabh, Naina gets a forlorn look in her eye and cries in the rain. She begs him to take her back, accosts his parents and belabors anyone who will listen about how lost she is without Rishabh and how she doesn’t know what to do with her life. It’s pathetic.

That’s not to say Naina’s reaction is unrealistic. It’s just that being sad isn’t the interesting part of getting dumped: it’s how a person gets over it. Naina doesn’t make any attempt to get over Rishabh or take charge of her career until the last fifteen minutes of this two-hour movie. Her plight devolves from dull to excruciating.

After Naina is dumped, she quickly rebounds into a sexual relationship with her ex-boyfriend, Jai (Purab Kohli), a successful artist who’s ready to settle down. Despite knowing that Jai’s in love with her, Naina sleeps with him repeatedly, but always with the caveat that she’s not over Rishabh yet — as though her honesty absolves her from leading him on.

This level of self-absorption would almost be forgivable if Naina were a nice person, but she’s not. In addition to her cruel treatment of Jai, she’s short-tempered with her mother, her maid, and her coworkers. When her friend, Malini (Tillotama Shome), breaks down in tears and discloses that she’s a lesbian, Naina looks at her as though she’s a freak and makes no attempt to comfort her.

As uninspiring a heroine as Naina is, Shrivastava is almost misogynistic in the way she writes Naina’s other best pal, Ruksana (Jeneva Talwar). Ruksana discovers her husband is cheating on her at the same time she learns that she’s pregnant. The pregnancy temporarily puts a halt to hubby’s wandering, but he strays again as soon as the baby is born. Ruksana tells Naina and Malini that her husband’s cheating no longer bothers her, now that she has a baby to love her.

Excuse me?

What’s worse is that Naina and Malini don’t even challenge Ruksana. No “you deserve better than that” pep talk. Just a shrug and an “as long as you’re happy” that seems to indicate that this is to be expected.

So, in a nutshell, Shrivastava’s realistic portrayal of the life of a modern Indian woman amounts to this: Get educated. Get a job. Land a husband before you get too old/before the unrelenting parental pressure to marry becomes unbearable/before he finds somebody with more money. Get knocked up and quit your job. Hubby will (and, judging by the women in this movie, maybe should) ditch you for a younger, hotter woman. But, hey, at least you’ve got a baby.

Why bother?

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Movie Review: Mirch (2010)

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2.5 Stars (4 Stars)

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Mirch (“Chili Pepper”) stands out from other Bollywood fare because of its subject matter: women’s sexuality. It’s a topic that makes some people skittish, yet Mirch addresses it with a sense of humor. However, the otherwise amusing movie fails to reach its full potential.

The movie is actually a series of four short stories — two set in the ancient past, two set in modern times — held together by a framing device. A rookie screenwriter, Maanav (Arunoday Singh), can’t find anyone willing to buy his original screenplay because the subject matter is deemed too dark and not “sexy” enough. So Maanav comes up with another plan: turn four stories from the ancient Panchatantra into a film.

The four stories all feature sexually liberated women who use their wits to get the better of their jealous, promiscuous spouses. Maanav’s girlfriend, a movie editor named Ruchi (Shahana Goswami), convinces her producer boss Nitin (Sushant Singh) to listen to Maanav’s pitch, even though it appears Nitin has his own designs on Ruchi.

The four stories unfold as Maanav’s narration gives way to cinematic depiction, starting with the two historical vignettes. First is the story of a frisky wife (Raima Sen) whose manual laborer husband becomes suspicious of her eagerness to hop in the sack with him.

Second is a story of a young bride (Konkona Sen Sharma) married to an impotent old king. The bride is desperate to lose her virginity, and she chooses a young courtier (also played by Arunoday Singh, who appears in two other stories as well) to do the deed. However, the courtier will only consent if the bride agrees to do it in front of her husband.

The characters in the “real life” storyline acknowledge a need for stories set in modern times, shifting the time period forward for the final two stories. Sen returns in the third story as another devoted wife whose husband (Shreyas Talpade) tests her fidelity. Sharma likewise returns for the fourth vignette, as a wife who catches her husband (Boman Irani) trying to cheat on her.

All of the stories start with straightforward premises but end with a twist: either the wife turns the tables on her husband, or she was hiding a secret all along. In every case, the stories acknowledge the fact that women have their own desires apart from fulfilling their husbands needs. Sen and Sharma carry the movie, playing their characters as provocative rather than overtly sexual.

While the vignettes have their charms, the framing device is uneven. The interludes between the mini-movies seem to be driving toward a love triangle finale that would force Ruchi to choose between Maanav and Nitin. A new character is introduced at the last minute, seemingly invalidating the implication that Nitin was ever interested in Ruchi.

Mirch also makes the unfortunate mistake of putting a character in blackface. When the husband in the third story dons a disguise in order to seduce his wife, he covers his skin in dark makeup. It’s a crude attempt at humor that’s loaded with racist undertones. A wig and a fake mustache would have been sufficient.

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Movie Review: Bluffmaster! (2005)

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3 Stars (out of 4)

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After being disappointed by Dum Maaro Dum, I decided to check out the first collaboration between Abhishek Bachchan and director Rohan Sippy: Bluffmaster! The pair’s first effort is clearly the superior of the two.

Bachchan stars in Bluffmaster! as conman Roy Kapoor. His heists have netted him loads of cash, and he has a sweet girlfriend named Simi (Priyanka Chopra) who thinks he’s a stockbroker. Simi learns the truth about him when a movie producer Roy conned shows up at their wedding.

Six months later, as Roy mourns his failed relationship with Simi, he watches a pair of small-time con artists trick a doctor out of his wallet. Roy retrieves the wallet and earns the friendship of the doctor, Bhalerao (Boman Irani). One of the cons, Dittu (Ritesh Deshmukh) is so impressed with Roy’s skills that he asks to become Roy’s student.

While Roy contemplates Dittu’s offer, he begins experiencing blackouts. Dr. Bhalerao discovers an inoperable brain tumor and gives Roy just months to live. Given Roy’s history of untruths, Simi assumes Roy’s brain tumor story is a trick and slams the door on him.

Dittu, unaware of Roy’s condition, explains that a prominent hotelier tricked his father out of his life savings. Roy decides to spend the little time he has left helping Dittu get his father’s money back. It’s the first time in Roy’s life that he’s ever put someone else’s needs above his own.

What distinguishes Bluffmaster! from Dum Maaro Dum is the former’s superior plot structure. While Dum Maaro Dum is mired in flashbacks and sideplots, Bluffmaster! moves forward at a steady clip. Just as it appears Roy may have a chance to win Simi back after all, his scheme with Dittu becomes more complicated than he expected. All the while, the threat of imminent death hangs over Roy’s head.

Bluffmaster! is based on the Argentine movie Nine Queens, which was also remade in America as Criminal. Additionally, Bluffmaster! shares similarities with Hollywood films like The Game and Matchstick Men. All of these movies directly or indirectly supply the template for Bluffmaster!. Meticulous continuity is the only way to make such a complex story work, and it does so in Sippy’s sophomore directorial effort.

The acting is uniformly good. Bachchan brings charm to a character who is initially a selfish crook. Irani is stellar as an elder who sees potential in Roy and has great affection for him. Chopra and Deshmukh are solid as the skeptic and the sidekick, respectively.

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DVD Review: 3 Idiots

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After taking Bollywood by storm in the waning days of 2009, the superb Hindi comedy 3 Idiots was finally released on DVD last week. Given the quality of the DVD, I think it was worth the wait.

I was so fond of 3 Idiots when I saw it in the theater that I named it my Best Bollywood Movie of 2009. It’s in many ways a movie from another time, a throwback to the days when a comedy featuring adult characters could be family-friendly and didn’t rely entirely on crude scatological or sexual humor.

25 years or so ago, studios could count on moviegoers to turn out for light comic fare starring adult characters. In 1984, Police Academy, Romancing the Stone and Splash were among the top ten highest-grossing films of the year in the U.S. All three of those comedies featured adult protagonists. Films with older teen protagonists like Gremlins, The Karate Kid and Footloose also made the Top Ten that year.

1984 wasn’t an aberration. 1985’s Top Ten included Cocoon, Jewel of the Nile and Spies Like Us, while 1986’s had Crocodile Dundee, Back to School and Ruthless People.

Fast-forward to the 21st century and you’ll see a box office dominated by big-budget action films and animated kids’ movies. Top-ten performances by grown-up comedies are rare: Meet the Fockers in 2004, Wedding Crashers in 2005, The Hangover in 2009. As a result, this type of movie is no longer a high priority for Hollywood studios.

That’s why 3 Idiots was so refreshing when it came out. The road trip comedy about two pals searching for their long-lost college chum is universal in its appeal. It’s funny and sweet, something that you can turn on any time you need a little pick-me-up.

20th Century Fox produced the DVD and made it especially accessible for American viewers who don’t understand Hindi. Dialog is subtitled in English automatically without having to change any menu settings. Within the setup menu, subtitle options include Spanish and French, as well as English for the deaf and hard of hearing — which adds descriptions of other audible noises (yawns, coughs, chuckles, etc.).

Sadly, the bonus features are inconsistently subtitled. Since they were shot on location and impromptu, the audio isn’t always clear. Though the actors and crew often speak in English, the poor sound quality makes it hard to understand.

Of the four bonus features, “Idiots in Ladakh” is the best, because it’s the most visual. The short film chronicles weather problems that beset the crew as they filmed in Ladakh, a picturesque mountain town in northern India near the Tibetan border. The brutal conditions nearly left some crew members stranded in a blizzard and delayed the film schedule for a year.

The other three bonus features are amusing, but not required viewing. “Making of Miss Idiot” shows the costume selection process for Kareena Kapoor’s nerdy character, which mostly boiled down to convincing glamorous Kareena to wear glasses. “Aal Izz Well” looks at the making of the dance number that accompanies the song of the same title, and “100% Idiots” reveals that the actors weren’t faking it during the movie’s drunk scene.

3 Idiots is one of the rare films that I feel confident in recommending to anyone, so go check it out.

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Movie Review: Dum Maaro Dum (2011)

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1 Star (out of 4)

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Copious amounts of sex, drugs, rock n’ roll, fights, chases and torture fail to liven up the dull and disorganized Dum Maaro Dum.

An opening shot of a dead body, accompanied by a voiceover by Abhishek Bachchan about the deadly drug trade in Goa, suggest a riveting tale of murder and corruption in a beachfront paradise. As soon as the opening credits finish, boredom sets in.

The movie is immediately mired in the backstory of one of the side characters, a teen named Lorry (Prateik Babbar). Lorry can’t afford to join his girlfriend at college in America, so he accepts a job as a drug mule, in order to earn the money for tuition. What I just summarized in one sentence takes up 25 minutes of screentime.

Twitchy-looking Lorry gets busted at the Goa airport by Kamath (Bachchan), a formerly corrupt vice cop trying to redeem himself after the accidental deaths of his wife and son. Kamath sends Lorry to jail, but the kid won’t reveal the whereabouts of the mysterious drug kingpin “Michael Barbosa.”

Kamath gets help from a musician name Joki (Rana Daggubati) in exchange for leniency for Lorry. Joki’s ex-girlfriend, Zoe (Bipasha Basu), is currently seeing another major drug dealer, Lorsa Biscuta (Aditya Pancholi). If anyone knows where Barbosa is, it’s Biscuta.

The plot isn’t nearly as straightforward as the above recap. There are flashbacks to pointless backstory, which prevents giving the characters enough time to grow (and grow on us) as events unfold in the modern-day.

This presents a serious problem, as Kamath — the presumptive, though not explicitly defined, lead character — is a monster. In addition to Kamath’s corrupt past and his penchant for beating up suspects, he sodomizes a drug runner with a pistol in order to make the guy confess. The movie’s villains may rack up a higher body count, but Kamath’s methods are more brutal and vile.

Substituting backstory for character development brings the action of the film to a crawl. Boring exposition about events not germane to the current situation is punctuated by party scenes, sex scenes and fight scenes. If you spend most of the film rudely texting on your cell phone, only to look up when the music cues something exciting on-screen, you might be fooled into thinking Dum Maaro Dum is an exciting movie.

The climax of the movie is actually pretty clever — so much so that the producers canceled the gala premiere in order to preserve the secret ending. But it seems as though writer Shridhar Raghavan started with the climax and struggled to craft the story that leads up to it.

Perhaps the poster tells us everything we need to know about Dum Maaro Dum. The poster features the svelte torso of Deepika Padukone, who makes a special appearance in a performance of the title track. Padukone is onscreen for all of five minutes, in a dance number that happens one hour and 45 minutes into the film. It is the best part of the movie.

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Movie Review: Crook (2010)

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2.5 Stars (out of 4)

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There’s a lot going on in the subtext of Crook regarding the different facets of racism and the immigrant’s struggle to balance integration with tradition. With a different structure– one that allowed the subtext more time to develop — Crook could’ve been a truly memorable movie.

The hero of Crook is Jai (Emraan Hashmi), a small-time video pirate in India. His adoptive father sends him to Australia under a false identity in order to give Jai a fresh start. Jai starts his new life in Melbourne as Suraj, a taxi driver working his way to permanent residency (unless he can find a cute Australian woman to marry first).

Two Aussie women catch Jai’s eye: a blonde stripper named Nikki (Shella Alan) and a student of Indian descent named Suhani (Neha Sharma). Nikki quickly falls for Jai, but Suhani’s strict brother, Samarth (Arjan Bajwa), intends to marry her to someone else.

Further complicating matters is a series of racially motivated attacks on Indian-Australians by white Australians. Suhani tries to bring Australians of all colors together and is frustrated by Jai’s unwillingness to get involved. Jai fears attracting police attention by participating in protests. If the police discover his true identity, he could be sent back to India.

Crook portrays racism as a two-way street. The white Australians who attack Indians are villains, but so are traditionalists like Samarth, who rejects Australian culture in the hopes of recreating India on a new continent. The only innocents are people like Suhani, who respects the values of her family as much as the values that dominate her adopted homeland.

Such nuance presents a problem in that it makes Jai’s decision not to take a stand look decidedly unheroic. He spends most of the movie running away from trouble. While it makes sense given his false identity, the threat of deportation isn’t as imminent or thrilling as, say, the threat of death.

Further, since the audience knows that eventually Jai has to get involved, he needs to take a stand much earlier in the film than he does. It takes more than half of the movie before Jai finally tells Suhani the truth about his past. Even then, he still insists that the racial tension inflaming the city isn’t his problem. A film hero needs to take charge of his destiny in a more definitive way than Jai does.

While the set up of the love story is fine, it doesn’t leave enough time for the action in the second half of the movie to unfold. When violence breaks out, characters undergo abrupt personality changes and plot points feel rushed.

Overall, Crook is a fun ride with some interesting moral observations. It just falls a bit short of its potential.

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