The Missing Virgin-72 Spaceship. Review on Phantom

The Missing Virgin-72 Spaceship

He, Saif, is on to something. Everyone is on to something. It is definite. But what, how, no one knows. The agents have been supplied with all the clues beforehand, leaving the confused audience twirling its fingers. Stony-faced actors, relentlessly exchange inane dialogue, to what end, no one knows.

The producer, sitting on a Piles_Hospital of cash the financier cannot stash in a Swiss bank anymore, TeamYesh a route chart on the map, figuring where to take the audience with all this money. He marks a galactic journey from UK to US to the Middle East and finally ends at the paav-strewn shores of India Gate, where on 26/11, 10 men killed 10 times their number and more.

Saif is a retired army officer who has been cashiered from service due to a silly misunderstanding of deserting his post, whereas he had just sauntered around the corner to take a pee – he claims he was out seeking a personal act of valor, when the tricky enemy sneaked up behind him and Finish938844ed off the men on his watch. He longs for redemption and for restoring his good name. The RAW offers him a sweet deal: reversion to officers’ commission with full military honors restored, in return for the heads of men responsible for the dastardly Mumbai attack on that fateful day, when among the comatose security men, the national conscience and pride snored as well.

Accompanied by a sassy Katrina Saif – oops – Kaif, the two Moslems set out to salvage wounded and oozy Hindu pride, and an impotent national aboutness. The two agents hardly seem to engage each other as professional crooks out to outsmart the other – their banter seems more of the order of lover’s tiff. There are none of the devices of James Bond for our cash-crunched Saif here – no Aston Martins or Martinis – neither shaken nor stirred. All he gets to wear on his sleeve is the marks left where his stripes were ripped off by the army.

The writers, who never miss the 9’o clock news and Arnab Roy’s show, take us to all the flashpoints across the globe like an Al Jazeera reporter. When we are in Syria we have a board that announces ‘ Wellcome to Syria, ’ just in case we forget. Little tickers that clackety-clack at the bottom of the screen always announce your 8-figure grid reference on the globe, and knock into your head where the action is taking place at that moment, because all of it looks like it’s been shot in our backyard in some studio in Mumbai!

The business of knocking people about assumes serious dimensions somewhere around the end of the first trimester; it is then that the scriptwriters realize they don’t have a story on their hands, and they’ve already paid through their bleeding orifices for hiring Kaif and Saif. To save their scaly skins they begin to spew blood and gore on the screen, as smokescreen for nonexistent drama.

Saif, assisted by a cutely smoking Kaif, pursues each of the perpetrators of 26/11 across the globe to single-handedly – sorry – double-handedly – for how can we forget the manicured tentacles of Katrina – to bring them to justice. He even – ha! – Swallows a battery that makes a sweet ‘plop’ sound when he poops it in a prison cell.

It’s tough to watch a movie these days without Sunny Leone; they’ve even blacked out Radhe Maa who’d filled in the voids in semi-clad entertainment. And don’t you call to question Katrina’s patriotism – she even swam without a two-piece swimsuit!

The army of braves, who’d spent hardest of their earned greenbacks on this movie, including me, sat with the patience of Job throughout, having left, as if, their Itch-Knobs back home. If someone could have offered to reimburse the cost of our soda and chips around the first five minutes, many of us would have gladly forsaken the cost of tickets as charity and vamoosed, cut stick, absquatulated from the hall.

Tales with honorable intent do not always make for good entertainment.

And mom as usual summed up the movie with her pithy observation; “but where the f@#* was the Phantom?”

Avoid this movie like female snakebite!