How do you make a good thing ugly?
Give it to an untalented artist and ask him to give it his original touch.
Take Irrfan Khan… good thing, fantastic actor. Now, what do you do to make him look bad?
Mani Shankar's original touch involves giving him a hideously fake wig because investment bankers with short hair probably aren't capable of being sleazebags. And then, make him do an item number.
Take Phone Booth … good thing, riveting thriller. What do you do to make it look bad?
Well, he could've made it Phone Bhooth (about a ghost caller) but maybe that wasn't a bad enough idea for the makers. The original touch here involves adding an India TV reporter who is smarter than all the cops in the area. In fact, she's smarter than the dangerous men with guns and helicopters with spy cameras. Or maybe because the SWAT logo on their van suggests they are pest control.
Take Sanjay Dutt… good thing, great guy. Always looks good in his obligatory slow motion swagger with shades. What do you do to mess that up?
Make him do Jet Li stunts.
Take Kangna Ranaut… good thing, beautiful actress. What do you do make her look bad?
Okay, that's easy. Just give her any dialogue with an English word in it.
Knock Out has many good things going for it. But then, the director has very little clue on what to do with it all once he runs out of situations from Phone Booth .
So he hurriedly makes the womanising scum of an investment banker undergo a change of heart halfway. Soon, it turns out that the guy with the gun has a heart of gold considerate enough to provide the scum with bulletproof protection. Even the most sensational of journalists have a change of heart to not report news in the interest of national security after getting to the hideout before the Swatters do. And people who were running helter-skelter after a bomb scare decide that it's their favourite place in the whole world and start cheering Irrfan's item number and make him a national hero.
Knock Out has absolutely no focus. It begins like a tale about personal vendetta and revenge for lost honour of a girl who killed herself and then becomes about personal morality and then shifts mood by making the lead do a frivolous dance number. Because people have a very limited attention span, the sniper reasons.
That probably explains the make-it-up-as-you-go narrative. Why is the film called Knock Out ? Turns out that the makers have a very limited attention span themselves. They forgot it was called that by the time they got to the ridiculous climax involving Irrfan Khan transferring Rs. 32,000 crore back to the Indian Government over the Internet in a few minutes. Something the man with a gun couldn't make him do two minutes into the film?
Genre: Drama
Director: Mani Shankar
Cast: Sanjay Dutt, Irrfan Khan, Kangna Ranaut, Sushant Singh, Gulshan Grover, Apoorva Lakhia
Storyline: Investment banker walks into a phone booth and gets a call from a mysterious sniper who threatens to fire at him if he hangs up.
Bottomline: This Phone Booth rip-off with ambitions of doing a Wednesday can't be watched even with a gun to the head.
