Pain has a new name at cinemas this week. Once he reinvented the old school action entertainers with Wanted , today Prabhudheva is taking audience for granted. Southern masala has lost its flavour. Flying bodies, chopped heads and strident background score no longer bring us to the edge. It is hard to follow the ways of Prabhu but this time even his devotees will like to send his licentious hero to skyway. In fact Sameer has found the right Hindi description for him in the song called “Chhichora Piya”, which loosely translates into cheap lover but Ajay Devgn lacks the effortless brazenness that Akshay Kumar and Shahid Kapur, Prabhu’s last two archetypes, could exude. Devgn doesn’t even try. He looks indifferent. Sonakshi continues to baffle with her dumb choices and Yami Gautam has picked the wrong vehicle to reach mainstream.
It seems Prabhu feels what works for a large section of Telugu audience can translate for Hindi and Punjabi heartland. But when you begin to feel that you have found a formula, it no longer remains one. One looks for a story but fails to find even a strand of originality. It is the same old tripe where the villain’s (newcomer Anand Raj plays the stereotypical one-eyed bad man) henchman revolts when his boss’s sister tries to seduce him. Prabhu tries to make it complex by throwing staple elements like double role, a love story with a comic angle, another romance with a tragic angle, a sidekick for slapstick. But none of them sticks. If the idea was to keep the audience on its toes, the treatment falters miserably. The situations are so predictable that you can even guess the next dialogue and more often than not Prabhu fails to surprise.
One holds on for humour but it leaves a bad taste. The girl feels that if she sees boy in a state of undress it will bring her luck. It is a running joke in the first half that leaves us wheezing. Bimbettes flaunting their figures and ignorance has become a constant feature in Prabhu’s cinescape as he treats his female characters as mere objects of desire. There is a constant struggle of size between Sonakshi’s character’s IQ and the length of debutante Manasvi Mamgai’s outfits. I think Manasvi’s proves to be a close winner. One waits for action but Prabhu unapologetically serves scenes from Kill Bill and low budget ninja movies. When it seems somebody is drawing sadistic pleasure when a woman is punched in the face, one doubts the sensibility of the filmmaker.
Even those who whistled for his Rowdy Rathore would find this hard to swallow.
Genre : Action/Drama
Director : Prabhudheva
Cast: Ajay Devgn, Sonakshi Sinha, Yami Gautam, Manasvi Mamgai, Anand Raj
Bottomline : Criminally insensitive, this one will take hard to beat!
