The 'X-Men: First Class' Review

Bryan Singer delivered the fantastic ‘X2: X-Men United’ back in 2003, since then the franchise lost its sheen in Brett Ratner’s disappointing third installment and finally imploded with the release of the horrid ‘Wolverine’ spinoff. Thankfully, X-Men: First Class has a sharp, intelligent script - it’s everything an origin story should be, complete with a cool 60’s James Bond-esque retro vibe. The reboot particularly stands out because this is one of the very few superhero films where the big budget CGI is merely an accessory to the snazzy character development, energy, power struggles and dollops of humour.

X-Men: First Class begins in 1944 Poland with a sequence reminiscent of the opening scene of the first film. A young Jewish boy named Erik is separated from his mother at a concentration camp; as he is dragged away by German soldiers the boy manages to bend the metal fences around the camp by will. Intrigued, Gestapo chief Sebastien Shaw (Kevin Bacon) summons the boy and orders him to demonstrate his mutant abilities.  Erik is unable to control his power, until Shaw kills his mother  - an incident that finally unleashes his power and decides his vengeful future. Elsewhere, a mind-reading rich young kid named Charles becomes a surrogate brother to a cobalt-blue shape-shifting little girl called Raven. 

Flash forward 20 years and we’re thrust bang in the middle of the cold war. Enter Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) who is now a brilliant scientist and also a playboy who picks up women using his telepathic powers.  Erik (Michael Fassbender) has learned to use his metal-bending abilities to quench his thirst for vengeance. Shaw is still alive and is secretly making arrangements for World War 3 for the greater good of the mutant species. A CIA operative named Moira MacTaggart (Rose Byrne) recruits Charles and Erik to help her uncover Shaw’s plans. Charles and Erik strike up a friendship and eventually work together to recruit and train other mutants, including the shape-shifting Mystique (the lovely Jennifer Lawrence). Needless to say, Charles and Erik have contrasting philosophies, and polarizing views of the role mutants should play in society. And if you’ve seen the earlier X-Men films, you know what their friendship turned out to be.  

Director Matthew Vaughn (Kick-Ass, Layer Cake) doles out a truly well-written and plausible origin tale here, together with sumptuous, stylish visuals and a faux historical twist that gives us a comic book version of a Tom Clancy bestseller. The pacing is relentless – X-Men: First Class rarely stops for a breather, and when it does, it offers a couple of cameo appearances from familiar faces that should have X-Men fans cheering. The film hits the sweet spot with the casting of McAvoy and Fassbender who’re so effortlessly dedicated to their roles you won’t believe they’re newcomers to the franchise. Fassbender in particular, gives an arresting performance with his ever-present righteous anger. Kevin Bacon is supremely villainous here, doing away with the smarm we’ve seen of him in the past. We’re introduced to some of the most popular X-Men like Emma Frost (January Jones) who can also transform her body into a diamond casing, the winged mutant Angel Salvadore (Zoe Kravitz), a demon-like teleporter named Azazel (Jason Flemyng), the ultrasonic Banshee (Caleb Landry Jones), the whirlwind creating Riptide (Alex Gonzalez), and Beast (Nicholas Hoult), who also made an appearance in X3. 

The bald spot of X-Men: First Class is January Jones as Emma Frost, who seems clueless and doesn’t do much else than stand about in bras and big hair, looking mildly PMS-y, oblivious of the words coming out of her own mouth. Another niggle is the character of Angel whose introduction is the most fun moment of the film but whose crossover to the antagonist’s side is very shoddily established.

However the in-jokes themselves are worth the price of admission. Sample the scene where Charles is trying out the Cerebro for the first time - McCoy asks “Are you sure we can’t shave your head?”, and Charles is quick to respond with “Don’t touch my hair”. The retro score by Henry Jackman (Kick-Ass, Monsters vs Aliens) just about perfectly goes with the gritty, stripped down look of the film. That’s not to say the CGI is underwhelming – it’s first rate, and the bombastic, epic finale is more than just satisfying for all the senses.  

X-Men: First Class is an exceptional entry in the series. It is smart, witty and a lot of fun. Watch it on the biggest screen possible.

First published in DNA

The 'Shaitan' Review

Let me cut through it and tell you straight – Shaitan blew me away. I'm not used to desi films this good being released in our country where normally studios throw unwatchable formulaic twaddle and wait for Khan season to roll around again. 

This movie had me alternating between a sugar-high and sheer awe. One minute, I struggled to keep my jaw closed, the next, I was jumping in my seat. Both extremes were equally pleasurable. Without a doubt, Shaitan is one of the boldest, most challenging Hindi films I've ever seen. It is also one of the most memorable. What a debut by Bejoy Nambiar; Park Chan-wook himself couldn't have directed a more feverishly thrilling bit of cinema. 

Take a dash of Boyle’s electric fuzz and generous helpings of the mojo of Chan-wook, and you've got a slightly derivative, though maddeningly gripping film. Nambiar wastes no time in setting up the players in this story about a fivesome of wayward youngsters - Amy (Kalki Koechlin), Dash (Shiv Pandit), KC (Gulshan Devaiya), Zubin (Neil Bhoopalam) and Tanya (Kirti Kulhari)  - who stage a kidnapping to pay off a slimy cop. The fact that these players are lacking any real depth or substance is actually of little consequence, for Nambiar drops them in a clever, complex caper that takes its share of mind blowing twists and turns.

There are the usual cross-section of characters with witty tongues involved in shady activities that get themselves into sticky situations in which no one survives unscathed. But despite the influences, Shaitan has an intensely authentic feel to it. And I know you're thinking Fadnavis, Bejoy Nambiar is an urban Indian, how could he not write an authentic "Urban Indian film"? Well, consider how many fake terrible ‘youth centric’ films written by Indian youths you’ve recently seen, and you’ll understand my sentiments. How did he do it? Well, the script is very smartly written, so you never think, "Desi youngsters don't talk like that" or "Kids would never do something like this". It's just the right mix of violence and humor with most of the intense bloodshed happening off-camera. Add to all of that a double helping of Nambiar’s even-handed directing complete with just the right amount of cool cinematography by R.Madhie.

Then the casting. Of the five leads, Pandit, Devaiya, Bhoopalam and Kulhari are absolutely marvelous playing insubordinate screw-ups with believable camaraderie and a kind of precarious charm. Rajeev Khandelwal is solid as a cop and Kalki is decent, but Udaan wonderboy Rajat Barmecha makes a hilarious, brilliant cameo. Shaitan is intricately edited by Sreekar Prasad. Not enough can be said about R.Madhie’s camerawork. Dominated by blue-orange tones and making frequent use of overcranked slow-motion shots and distancing low and high angles, Shaitan at times feels like a crazy, disturbing dream. The trippy effect is but emphasised by the incredible music, which combines close to a dozen genres. A remixed, souped-up version of ‘Khoya Khoya Chaand’ is set against the backdrop of a shootout and ‘Pintya’ is gloriously juxtaposed with a chase scene. Stunning stuff. 

Beneath the visual and aural pizzazz, and the snazzy dialogue, Shaitan offers a sombre view of directionless, immoral Indian youth. There is something reactionary in the broad portrayal of young people as hopelessly self-centered, callous and insensitive, but the pessimism includes the adult characters too. There is no possibility of redemption for anyone, and social relationships here are just a web of rebellion, rejection and cruelty in which everyone is guilty. Hat tip to producer Anurag Kashyap for shepherding fresh, high quality stories - without him we'd still be living in the 90's pyaar-mohabbat deluded hogwash. 

Shaitan is a marvelously crafted, stylish bit of filmmaking. It's a saucy thriller. It’s the perfect example of twisted perfection. You’d be a complete fool to miss such edgy entertainment.  

The 'Hanna' Review

 I won't tell you ‘Hanna’ is great, but it's great fun. Director Joe Wright’s latest is a revenge action flick that is deliberately preposterous and often morally reprehensible. It’s not high-art, nor is it especially logical, but it's a damn good entertainer, provided you don't take any of it too seriously.

It’s hard to believe that ‘Hanna’ is directed by the guy who made ‘Pride and Prejudice’ and ‘Atonement’, and it’s even harder to digest the fact that 16-year-old Saoirse Ronan makes Jason Bourne look like a wimp. It’s a shame that writers David Farr and Seth Lochhead saddled her with indigestible dialogue and preposterous situations.  ‘Hanna’, unlike ‘Sucker Punch’ is not a film about hot girls with big guns. Saoirse (pronounced Ser-sha) Ronan stays in a remote Finnish jungle with her father Erik (Eric Bana) who trains her to become an unstoppable killing machine. Hanna is proficient in hand-to-hand combat, arms and ammunition, archery, Jujitsu and is pretty much devoid of emotion. Erik is revealed to be an ex-CIA operative, who then sends his daughter on a mission to assassinate a CIA honcho named Marissa (Cate Blanchett) and zip from Finland to Morocco to Spain with a purpose that's not entirely clear until the second act kicks in.

The action is brutal and uncompromising, and is elevated by the heart-pounding score by the Chemical Brothers. Joe Wright’s long tracking shots are delectable to behold – one fight scene filmed in a parking lot is particularly eye popping. Wright seems to have an outstanding vision for aggression, the chase scene in the tunnel underneath the CIA stronghold is filmed with pure amphetamine.  I should, however, note that ‘Hanna’ takes a little while to get going, because Wright devotes the first 20 minutes to establishing the relationship between the father and the daughter.  And there are colossal plotholes throughout - Wright cowardly tries to sidestep the obvious fate of some of Hanna’s characters, hoping we won’t remember to question him later. Moreover, just about anyone could devise the premise of ‘Hanna’. But the real measure here isn’t what happens but in how it happens.

Beneath the electronic music and intense imagery of ‘Hanna’ lurks a subtle (albeit ham-fisted) societal message – the protagonist is forced to deal with new elements such as family, friendship, love - difficult tasks for a person who has no compassion, a person who runs away, leaving friends behind to face the fate she has brought down upon them at the hands of her pursuers.  Saoirse Ronan is an absolute powerhouse who effortlessly veers from being a child to an adult. It’s rather unsettling to see the skinny little child actress convincingly pull off a character that can snap a person's neck like a twig. Cate Blanchett’s steely gaze and Bana’s single shot fight scene are themselves worth the price of admission. Tom Hollander is surprisingly creepy as the sleazy hitman hired to take Hanna down.

‘Hanna’ doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but it’s delightfully agile. It crams all the revenge rage it possibly can into 110 minutes without taking its eyes off Ronan and her beautifully intimidating performance. Do watch.

 




First published in DNA

The 'Ready' Review

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The 'Kuchh Luv Jaisaa' Review

It’s never a good sign when a film is more considerate towards its heroine than the audience is. The target audience here is women. With any luck Kuchh Luv Jaisaa will end up as a tipping point, signaling the moment that Indian women finally stopped paying to see themselves look stupid on the big screen. 

Kuchh Luv Jaisaa is rife with horrors, thanks to a sloppy script and a central character (Shefali Shah) who is impossible to care about. The film also boasts some of the most forced and unrealistic dialogue I have ever seen - Sumit Raghavan, while talking to his friend about his wife blurts out ‘Nail polish is like a friend, aur ek friend hi to chahiye sabko’.  

So here we have a bored housewife (Shefali) upset over her hubby’s (Sumit Raghavan) lack of interest in her. After he forgets her birthday, she decides to indulge in some retail therapy and ultra glam makeover. Along comes her wet dream, a rugged, manly dude wearing cooling glasses (Rahul Bose), a wanted terrorist who fools her into believing that he is a detective.  The fundamental flaw of this film is that it expects us to find Shefali’s character endearing, but instead she comes across as a relentlessly stupid fool who deserves to suffer. This urban, sophisticated, well-read woman actually moves into a hotel room with a stranger who claims to be a detective. And when she does find out about his villainy, she returns to the hotel room to talk to him, in order to flee. You’re supposed to feel for a woman with an uncaring husband, instead you want her to be collared and humiliated for being such an unintelligent cow.

To make matters perfectly clear, I don’t hold Kuchh Luv Jaisaa against Shefali Shah. She desperately tries to play it all cute and ditsy, deploying her smile and puppy dog eyes at every opportunity.  It’s not her fault the film is a shallow, worthless trip to the land of idiocy and pointlessness. Although there’s no denying Rahul Bose’s complete lack of compassion for paying audiences. He has the timing of a Rolex watch that is made in Ulhasnagar – and he speaks in a Mumbai don accent with the dexterity of a little girl with her shoelaces tied together. What’s more, there is zero chemistry between any of the characters, there is hardly any discernible difference between the film’s leads drunk or sober. 

Then there are a few scenes that are downright cringe-inducing. Shefali’s character casually asks her preteen daughter if she has had sex, and when the kid asks her if ‘sex’ is ‘love’, the mother suddenly goes into flashback mode and visualizes Rahul Bose standing close to her in an elevator to the backdrop of pseudo rock music. In another scene some mannequins at a departmental store come alive when Shefali walks by with a new haircut. I did not know that mannequins in store windows could actually get aroused. And even their performance is less wooden that Bose’s.  

Kuch Luv Jaisaa is assembled from every possible spare part required to make a laughably bad film. Its offenses come by the dozen, but the worst is its portrayal of Indian women as gullible, easily misled, irrational dodos.  Even the recent Govinda film ‘Naughty at 40’ is more resplendent with intellect.

First published in DNA

The 'Pyaar ka Punchnama' Review

Pyaar ka Punchnama has nonstop bust-your-gut funny material that will make your face hurt with laughter. Writer-director Luv Ranjan have made a film that should qualify as a date movie for guys, but unlike most of the lowbrow Hindi comedies in theaters these days, this one isn't quite a carp.  

PKP is an irreverent, raucous comedy that is gleefully crass - the funniest moment is a six minute long profanity-laden monologue on nagging women belted out at 3000 decibels as a throw-away joke. Another scene treats us with a character’s devilishly possessive girlfriend seducing him to let her accompany him on a Goa trip that was planned by his friends to recapture the hedonism of their uncommitted days. These moments aren't mildly funny or chuckle funny but downright hysterical, infused with ferociously coarse, go-for-broke sensibility. And every ounce of the film’s success can be attributed to its three male stars - Kartikeya Tiwari, Rayo Bhakhirta and Divyendu Sharma, who manage to respectably pull off this otherwise ridiculously structured comedy. 

I must admit that the trailers of Pyaar ka Punchnama slightly misrepresented the final product – it’s not the least bit a sex comedy. The elements of a first-love plot with all its complications are not new, but the charecterisations here are just too darn compelling. Here we have Rajat (Tiwari), Chaudhary (Bhakirtha) and Liquid (Sharma), a trio with an ‘Office Space’ hangover desperate to find love. Chaudhary hooks up with the sassy Neha (Nushrat Bharucha), Rajat finds the saucy Riya (Sonalli) and the shy, good-hearted Liquid has the hots for Charu (Ishita), a girl in his office. The plot thickens when Chaudhary moves in with Neha who soon turns into a niggling, possessive, conniving witch.  Meanwhile Rajat’s girl refuses to break contact with her ex boyfriend. And Charu turns out to be a manipulative vixen who uses Liquid’s earnestness to her advantage and treats him like a doormat.  

Yes there is some drama, but it is never jarring, in fact the subtle shifting of relationships is beautifully realised here. Even the emotionally charged scenes are pretty much character-driven soap opera without resorting to tackiness. If anything, Pyaar ka Punchnama will have a certain appeal to a certain audience - namely other guys in their mid-twenties in crappy jobs struggling to learn about love and life. 

Divyendu Sharma makes acting like a moron seem like a natural and endearing byproduct of middle-class Indian befuddlement. He excels at dignity-free merriment and can deliver even the most average of punch lines with enough lunacy to merit a laugh. Rayo Bhakhirta unleashes genial lunkheadedness. Kartikeya Tiwari is affably low key. Ishita and Sonallii are passable, but Nushrat Bharucha is brilliantly unlikeable. If Love Sex aur Dhoka weren’t enough, Pyaar ka Punchnama gives us another reason to follow the career of this gifted young actress.  Sudhir Chaudhary’s cinematography is eye-popping, but if there’s one thing that’s grating about the film it is the overindulgence in musical cues. A salsa number between Tiwari and Sonallii makes no sense either, but that’s just moaning.

Pyaar ka Punchnama is one of the best, most satisfying comedies to come along in a while. For its subversive genre, it is a fantastic reminder that when you get right down to it, finding The One and actually getting her to accept you the way you are is hilariously difficult.  

 




First published in DNA

The '404' Review

404 is a good lesson to Bollywood that a fright film need not be brimming with blood, girls in tank tops and cheesy 3D special effects.

404 isn't the average Vikram Bhatt shockathon, it is a deliberately slow-paced mystery-psych-horror drenched in atmosphere, with a few clues up-front and much to talk about afterwards. It might bore the Ramsay lover to sleep, and it certainly isn’t made for the Ragini MMS and Haunted audiences. 404’s is a story that patiently unwraps itself, giving away little with each step, unwinding until its final scenes offer a world of revelations. Prawal Raman’s script doesn't rule out an otherworldly dimension to the story, but it is not necessarily present. Everything in 404 has a plausible explanation, whether something supernatural is happening is left for us to decide, and that's part of the fun.  

Abhimanyu (Rajvvir Arora) enrolls into a prestigious medical college that has Gothic edifices and an illustrious history. Freshers were locked up in morgues when they resisted ragging, and the shadowy hostel room 404 is the site of an even more disreputable incident – a student had killed himself in there. As expected, young Abhimanyu pleads the hostel authorities to let him stay in the room, and professor Aniruddh (Nishikant Kamat), impressed by the boy’s courage and in an effort to whitewash the incident from everyone’s memory, obliges. Abhimanyu moves in, but something about the room feels off – he hears sounds he can't explain, lights go on unexpectedly and soon enough, a dead guy makes an appearance. We're never quite sure just who's involved, is there a ghost wandering around the campus? Or is the central character psychotic or possessed? Is someone suffering from split personality? Is it one of the seniors playing a prank for some ulterior motive? Raman gives us enough contradictory information to make us desperate to know, even as he ties us in knots fearing whatever answer he may provide. The sense of building dread peaks about three-fourths through then fizzles out, sadly. Too exhausted to care anymore, we're left with nothing to do but guess who'll die and figure out who might be responsible. It is common in horror flicks for the climax and resolution to fail to live up to expectations created by the buildup, but 404’s payoff is quite satisfactory. 

Acting is another factor that raises 404 above the usual dreck presented in similar films. Director Raman does fine work with the actors, getting believable performances from his cast in the face of obviously ludicrous situations. Raman also knows about the fundamental silliness of horror films, he goes for the most baroque alarming effects with a completely straight face, even using loud sounds throughout to unsettle the audience. The jolt of suddenly seeing something creepy in a strategically placed mirror is frustratingly overused, though. Most of the cast turns in good performances, with Kamat being the standout as a concerned professor trying to keep things pulled together. Rajvvir Arora makes a strong debut here, Satish Kaushik and Tisca Chopra do well but add nothing to the story. Imaad Shah is completely miscast as a king hotshot college senior and hams to the hilt.  

If you feel like watching a film that moves very slowly, gives you a handful of characters with minimal backgrounds, tosses a few ambiguous and spooky cookies your way and is ultimately satisfying once you put it all together, then 404 is definitely for you. The setup here is sufficiently compelling to make its many gimmicky flourishes just as nerve-wracking as they're supposed to be - we're always anticipating something awful.  It’s got a lot more punch than that 3D Hindi horror film that arrived a couple of weeks ago.  

First published in DNA