No lip gloss..at last
Cast: Emraan Hashmi, Shreya Saran, Mrinalani Sharma
Direction: Mohit Suri
Rating: **
He’s got the glower power. This troubled dude in Hong Kong stares at every man, woman, child
and insect. And since he’s portrayed by Emraan Hashmi, he stands on expressways looking at the clouds above as cars zip-`n’-zap. Also his beard becomes thicker than the Amazonic forest when he’s upset which is all the time. Oh dear, mafia lord Ashutosh Rana treats him worse than a rotten banana.
Cadged from the Korean film Bittersweet Life, the only unusual point of Awarapan is that Mr Hashmi doesn’t kiss – not even once. Hurray, it’s a holi-holiday. Instead, in the role of a gangster type he keeps falling in love – coincidentally with Muslim women (Saran-Sharma, though it’s difficult to tell which one is which. One khatoon is killed by her manic dad who also kills himself..and the other one is about to be killed by Rana and more horrors than you could find in a Ramsay retrospective.
It’s difficult to decipher what director Suri is striving to say through the inter-communal love stories. Salaam alaikum, there’s even a Veer-Zaara-like lecture in Pakistan at the end. The director is impressive only when he’s into shooting hardcore action scenes. He also has a flair for exposing the sleaze and sex parlours in the back-alleys of the big cities, like did in the case of Amsterdam in Kalyug.
Except for its underworld-probing moments, this gangsta flick is as slow as watching paint peeling – this despite an excellent music score by Pritam. Of the cast, for once Emraan Hashmi is intense and believable.. aha, so there’s more to him than those lucky lips, after all.
Recommended? Hmmm, just about maybe.