E-Paper
An unholy mess: Rashid Irani reviews the 26/11 film, One Less God
In the style of a Z-grade Hollywood disaster flick, the movie introduces a cross-section of foreigners cowering in the rooms as the violence escalates.
An appalling dramatisation of the 2008 terrorist siege at Mumbai’s Taj Mahal hotel, One Less God is one sorry spectacle.
The film is written and directed by first-timer Lliam Worthington, who goes where he wishes with the story and then has the temerity to dedicate it to the staff and guests who died in the massacre.
An appropriate epigraph from Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet is followed by random scenes showing Holi revellers in slow motion. The connection between the annual March festival of colour and the carnage that unfolded in November is never explained.
Cut to the interior of the hotel (a nondescript venue in New South Wales was primarily used as a stand-in for the iconic original). In the style of a Z-grade Hollywood disaster flick, we are introduced to a cross-section of foreigners cowering in the rooms as the violence escalates.
Possibly for a slightly more balanced representation, an elderly Indian gentleman (Sukhraj Deepak) and his granddaughter (Mihika Rao) are also shown trapped on the upper floors.
For reasons known only to the filmmaker, the perpetrators are represented by two ineffectual, coke-snorting jihadists.
Amateurishly acted (the exception being the young Rao) and chaotically staged (the action scenes are particularly unexciting), One Less God is even worse than the insufferable Replicas. This is not a good week at the movies.
