Ek – The Power of One
Cast: Bobby Deol, Nana Patekar, Sachin Khedekar, Raghubir Yadav, Shriya Saran
Direction: Sangeeth Sivan
Rating: *
Let’s say you had some spare crores lying around, you wanted to make a total masala movie, you played tic tac toe and bingo, you hit on a desi cops ‘n’ robbers flick.
Now if you set out to fill it with all the stock ingredients, what would you bung in? A taciturn bad guy. A cool, smart alec cop. The hero’s jigri dost. Some desi mafiosi. Plenty of guns and dishoom dishoom of course. A double cross here and there. The mandatory love interest. An upright father, a loving, seedha-saadha family… okay, okay, enough already.
Get ready for all this… and more. Here’s the basic premise: minister (Sachin Khedekar) hires professional killer to shoot (and miss) him so as to gain sympathy votes (“From wheelchair to CM’s chair.”) . But someone else bumps off mantriji, so the thwarted killer Nandu (Bobby Deol) assumes the identity of a dead man, Puran, even managing to fool his family in Punjab. When he’s eventually found out, his only hope is to find the real killer.
If the plot sounds shaky, wait, its execution (no pun intended) plunges it several painful notches lower. In fact, every single aspect of this utterly inane film is a disaster. It’s difficult to decide what’s worse: Bobby Deol’s bizarre hairstyle or his acting (the former wins by a whisker) . Nana Patekar as the maverick cop who hunts Nandu down does his usual number but even his style cannot carry off the wannabe dialogue (which goes from “darrling” and “swittie” to a reference to Hamlet’s soliloquy). Chunkey Pandey surfaces in an unbearably grating, hammy act. And some completely crass jokes are the last straw; in fact, the film ends with one. Truly a fitting finale.
E-mail author: shashi.baliga@hindustantimes.com
If the plot sounds shaky, wait, its execution (no pun intended) plunges it several painful notches lower. In fact, every single aspect of this utterly inane film is a disaster. It’s difficult to decide what’s worse: Bobby Deol’s bizarre hairstyle or his acting (the former wins by a whisker) . Nana Patekar as the maverick cop who hunts Nandu down does his usual number but even his style cannot carry off the wannabe dialogue (which goes from “darrling” and “swittie” to a reference to Hamlet’s soliloquy). Chunkey Pandey surfaces in an unbearably grating, hammy act. And some completely crass jokes are the last straw; in fact, the film ends with one. Truly a fitting finale.
E-mail author: shashi.baliga@hindustantimes.com