Jan 21, 2008 06:48 AM
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Well, ok I finally blink. This won’t be a general advice review. But off-late I’ve been doling out general advices on and off Mouthshut so much that I have practically become the advisor to the whole world. I’ll get into the specifics straight away.
How did I end up watching this movie? Well after a day long trip to Glasgow as I sat down to have my dinner I wondered what to do. Nothing came to my mind so I just logged on the internet, searched up some videos and bumped into this movie. The site where I found it had broken it down into 10 parts of approximately equal lengths. I put the movie to buffer and went to the kitchen to fetch food. 10 minutes later, I was watching Halla Bol even as my stomach was boling halla at the taste of badly prepared Rajma.
The movie had an average beginning. A so-called superstar, played by Ajay Devgun, is releasing a book, supposedly his biography while everybody(including him) knows that the book is a fake. People are whispering behind his back that he is a crap actor. He is shown to be highly manipulative, having a street smart secretary and keen to get as much exposure as he can on the silver screen, so much so that he has planned to cut the screen time of a young and talented actor played by Tusshar Kapoor.
Next, the actor is witness to the murder of a girl at a high society party. The entire rigmarole of the media frenzy and ‘breaking news’ is shown and minutes later each and every celebrity who attended the party is denying any involvement. Then he sees this young girl at the police commissioner’s office and she claims to be the murdered girl’s sister. He then tries to bribe her by giving her cash worth 10 lacs but she doesn’t back out.
Oh I nearly forgot! All this while the actor reminisces his past. Vidya Balan comes into the picture as his lover. He leaves her for a while, goes to Mumbai, becomes a successful actor, returns to marry her, they have a son and he grows up. All this in half an hour! Was there a romantic song thrown in between all this? To be honest I don’t remember. The beauty of watching a movie online or on DVD is that you can skip the songs if there are any. And that’s what I did!
Pankaj Kapoor also comes into the picture courtesy the actor’s flashback. His character is called Siddhu for reasons not known to me who has a change of heart and he turns from a gangster to a master street theatre artist. He is the mentor of Ajay Devgun but when he asks for Ajay’s help to fight the goons in a remote village, Ajay backs out.
This is the point where I stopped watching the movie, partly because my internet connection which I share with 3 other people had gone bad. But in hindsight I don’t regret not watching the movie till the end. Here is why –
The performances were pretty ordinary. Ajay Devgun is a fine actor, but what he dished out was something that I rank as his worst. Having seen his powerful performances in Gangajal, Golmaal and Omkara, I was taken aback by what was on display here. His portrayal of a manipulative superstar was simply bad. But somehow, his role of the superstar reminded me of Shah Rukh Khan, maybe because his portrayal of the superstar’s meteoric rise to fame was to some extent inspired by SRK’s real life meteoric rise.
Vidya Balan had very limited screen space but she did alright first as a young girl in love and then as a young wife cum mother. Oh yeah, there was Jackie Shroff too, with his trademark bhidu accent. He had only one scene in the length of the movie I saw. The silver lining of the movie is Pankaj Kapoor. Again he had rather limited space in the first half of the movie yet he leaves a mark.
The story of the movie looks to have been concocted from the real life incidents surrounding the Jessica Lal murder case. The fact that it shows the murder of a model, her family running from pillar to post to get justice, money power exchanging hands, police’s role under question all point to how the story takes a dig at real life incidents. Noble intentions I must say, but the execution has been bad.
There is nothing to write about the soundtrack. I guess it is pretty ordinary and secondly I preferred to skip it, like I usually do when I watch a DVD. So what happens next? Can somebody please tell me?
As a general advice on reviewing half a movie I can say that by doing so you have the luxury of telling the entire story till the point you’ve seen the movie and yet keep the reader guessing about what happens next.
