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Showing posts with the label action

JAWAAN (2023) : review

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And finally the much hyped, much awaited Jawaan saw light of the day ! Big stars, big budget( humongous budget actually), big music composer, everything super large. But does it meet the expectations of the average viewer? No it goes not. Read on.  A decorated jawan locks horns with a criminal called Kaali, this is in 1986 ( the year movies like Aakhri Raasta released, just for reference). Kaali gets him eliminated and send the pregnant wife to jail. The baby born in jail grows up to become the hero (look alike of the father) and decides to avenge the misdeeds done to his innocent patriotic parents. Well, isn’t it a masaaledaar full on Bollywood- Tollywood drama subject ?  And then the director Atlee also borrows ideas and references from various retro movies, some idea from Sholay (1975) as the hero assembled a gang of jailed Qaidis in order to form a team to nab the villain, then there’s an entire episode borrowed from Dhartiputra (1993), and the basic theme is copy pasted ...

JAWAAN (2023) : review

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And finally the much hyped, much awaited Jawaan saw light of the day ! Big stars, big budget( humongous budget actually), big music composer, everything super large. But does it meet the expectations of the average viewer? No it goes not. Read on.  A decorated jawan locks horns with a criminal called Kaali, this is in 1986 ( the year movies like Aakhri Raasta released, just for reference). Kaali gets him eliminated and send the pregnant wife to jail. The baby born in jail grows up to become the hero (look alike of the father) and decides to avenge the misdeeds done to his innocent patriotic parents. Well, isn’t it a masaaledaar full on Bollywood- Tollywood drama subject ?  And then the director Atlee also borrows ideas and references from various retro movies, some idea from Sholay (1975) as the hero assembled a gang of jailed Qaidis in order to form a team to nab the villain, then there’s an entire episode borrowed from Dhartiputra (1993), and the basic theme is copy pasted ...

Dhaakad- Review

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From Budapest to Bhopal you get to experience a torturous, terribly violent and eardrum shattering journey of good vs evil in Razneesh Ghai’s Hollywood inspired thriller Dhaakad!  Packed with punch, that fizzles out every now and then the story (or the lack of it) is about an agent named Agni (Ranaut) and her fight against a human trafficking mafia Don (Rampal). Dragging for over 131 minutes it’s a long and never ending boredom. Some of the scenes are stretched and dragged till you yawn, some flashbacks are so recurrent that you wanna catch hold of the director and request him to stop it right there !  It’s good to see the beautiful and unexplored city of Bhopal and some more lovely locations in Madhya Pradesh being beautifully explored in this movie. That’s the only saving grace, the lovely photography and scenic locales. The screenplay is weak, dialogues dull and storyline is a mishmash of 70s Bollywood trash combined with wannabe Lara Croft meeting kill bill.  Ghai’s ...

CHAKRAVYUH : Review

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Directed by: Sajit Warrier  Streaming on : mx player  Cast: Prateik Babbar, Ashish Vidyarthi, Simran Kaur Mundi, Gopal Dutt, Shiv Pandit, Urvashi Sardhara, Anjali Shivaraman, Ayesha Kanga, Twinkle Tshering, Ruhi Singh, Rajesh Khera, Rohan Joshi and others.  If successful this series could turn into a franchise chronicling the adventures of inspector Virkar( Babbar). This particular season deals with cyber crime and sex racket. And how Virkar with his intelligence and wits unravels the mystery. That’s what we are made to believe.  There are a series of serial killings in Mumbai that give sleepless nights to the crime bureau. The beefed up inspector Virkar is assigned the responsibility to track down the serial killer. The victims are all young teenagers, it starts with the brutal murder of a young boy where he’s castrated and stabbed to death. Then another boy is murdered brutally and his eyeballs are sucked out of their sockets. The third victim is a young girl murd...

Paurashpur(2021): Web Series Review

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Directed by: Sachindra Vats  Cast: Annu Kapoor, Shilpa Shinde, Milind Soman, Sahil Salathia, Poulomi Das, Anant Joshi, Rajesh Tripathy, Flora Saini, Shaheer Sheikh and others.  Once upon a time in a kingdom there lived a virile king who married multiple times, but his bride would disappear after their much sleazily filmed Suhaag Raat ! Then there’s a hunt for those brides, that’s the basic plot of this ‘period’ web-series which appears more like a film converted into OTT series considering the 2.26 hours length.  And you thank your stars for that length! It’s nothing less than a torture to watch this beautiful trash wherein the producer (the great Ekta Kapoor) dishes out just about any crap in the name of cinematic liberty. Worse, you’ve audience that lap up these shenanigans. Just why?  The director or perhaps it’s the powerful producer’s insistence that they rely entirely on various angles of the female anatomy in-order to attract viewers. Each and every female ch...

HIGH (2020) review

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HIGH (2020)  Directed by: Nikhil Rao  Cast: Akshay Oberoi, Ranvir Shorey, Mrinmayee Godbole, Prakash Belwadi, Kunal Naik, Shweta Basu Prasad, Padmavati Rao, Mantramugdh, Nakul Bhalla, Veerendra Saxena, and others  Brilliant ! If this thrilling web series has to be described in one word it’s brilliant. Totally high on ‘substance’ quite literally though, it tends to intoxicate you with its freshness and innovative conceptualisation.  A group of doctors discover a drug which they aptly name ‘magic’, a former junkie assists them in marketing it amongst the targeted audience, now there’s more to this drug than just being a ‘drug’, so there are Two Drug Mafias hunting for it, a grey haired CEO of a pharma company sends her henchman to hunt, and an ambitious journalist also gets intrigued by its ‘magic’.  It’s more about the unique and evenly paced treatment by the director that makes ‘High’ stand out from rest of the web series these days. There’s thrill, there are s...

BETAAL (2020) review

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BETAAL (2020)  Directed by: Patrick Graham and Nikhil Mahajan  Cast: Vineet Kumar, Ahana Kumra, Jitendra Joshi, Jatin Goswami, Suchitra Pillai, Siddharth Menon, Manjiri, Ankur Vikal, Pawan Singh, Akhilesh Unnithan, Ratan Nag, Baby Syna, Savita Bajaj, Meenal Kapoor and Richard Dillane.  Picture this- one fine day, or preferably at night you discover that your immediate boss has turned into a bloodthirsty zombie, how would you react? The lead actor faces this uncomfortably dangerous situation in this horror webseries.  A special squad is assigned inorder to evacuate a village, unknowingly they end up reactivating a battalion of British zombies who ruled that location centuries ago. Thereafter begins a blood soaked violent battle between the living and the dead, with survival of the fittest.  The director is known for his earlier horror attempt Ghoul(2018) which didn’t quite cut the ice with viewers, with Betaal he tries mixing age old Indian myth with a contempora...