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Bollywood Film Review

Johnson Thomas

Knotty, Twisty, shrill, Illogical Thriller



Film: Malang

Cast: Aditya Roy Kapur, Disha Patani, Anil Kapoor, Kunal Khemu, Elli Avrram, Keith Sequeira, Shaad Randhawa, Vatsal Seth, Amruta Khanvilkar

Director: Mohit Suri

Rating: * *

Runtime: 134 mins



Mohit Suri’s latest seems to have jumped out of a drug induced haze…else, why would the plotting lose its biggest gambit by twisting the narrative out of all the sense it hoped to make? There are twists and there are turns here but they appear to be an attempt to cover-up scriptural malfunctions rather than tell a logical story.



The film begins with a fight sequence in a prison. A buffed-up Aditya Roy Kapur, whose back is facing the camera throughout the longest fight sequence in the film, beats up, punches, whacks, bludgeons and picks up and drops guys twice his size, in an effort to establish his fighting dominance. But the fact that his back is turned to the camera indicates something else altogether (if you get my point). Then comes the flashes into a past littered with drugs, parties and self-indulgences. In a silly show of independence two young people Advait (Roy Kapur) and Sara(Disha) break away from their steady lives to visit Goa and live like free spirits. That’s where they bump into each other, experience free love and go their separate ways. Sara finds she is pregnant but Advait runs away from the responsibility. By the time he comes to his senses, he is too late to prevent a tragedy from happening. The narrative intersperses past and present in a bid to keep the viewer on tender-hooks trying to guess a reason that’s all-too-obvious. The weirdest constructs play out here. While Advait goes all out on a vengeance spiel trying to eliminate all those he holds responsible- including a group of cops Michael(Khemu) and his buddies, Inspector Anjaney Agashe ( Anil Kapoor hamming it all the way) goes haywire gripped in a grief of his own making. To top it all the very reasoning for the vengeance spiel ceases to exist. Everything goes south from there.



The action choreography is crisp with sound accompaniments that add crispy punch but it is not realistic. The attempt to make winter solstice a sort of code word for the vengeance spiel falls flat because for most of the film the audience is clueless about its meaning. The dialogues are the inanest I’ve ever heard in a film in a long time. While Aditya manages to insert some feeling into his performance, Disha just manages to look pretty and clueless. Khemu’s role takes an unbelievable U turn so his performance, despite the effort, looks silly. Shaad, Keith, Amruta and others are mere window dressing in a script( by Aniruddha Guha) that forces damaging action and vengeance on your senses without any cogent, plausible reasoning. It’s like getting away with murder by merely claiming innocence!



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