Story: Izna (Sunny
Leone) wears the per
fect clothes, travels business class and sleeps only with the poshest men. She is now on to her riskiest client, a high-end terrorist Kabir, played with an enigmatic wackiness by Randeep Hooda,whom the Indian government, represented strangely by only two officers Arunodoy Singh and his senior Arif Zakaria, wants dead or alive.
As luck would have it, Izna was once in love with Kabir. Now she must pretend to be in love with him again. Perhaps because Ms Leone is new to dramatic acting, we never quite understand how Izna feels about rekindling old passions with the man who once loved her and then left her.
Is she still in love with him while pretending to be seducing him? Does she take up the dangerous job in the subconscious hope of teaming up with him for life? And when Kabir finally tells her a deep damning secret about the people she’s working for she reacts so foolishly that we can only say working with the body numbs the mind.
REVIEW: For those expecting a show with the queen of adult content, Jism 2 is a bit of a damper. There are three well-oiled bodies, two male and one female, caught in the throes of an anguished do-or-die passion that can only burn itself out. But physical relation is really not the solution for these wounded characters.
Just how much the confusion and inner chaos projected by Izna is actually Sunny Leone’s is hard to tell. On the plus side, Ms Leone often looks surprisingly vulnerable and wounded on camera.
She has a terrific pair of legs which she generally keeps crossed. But she manages to keep us interested in more than her physical assets.
Arunoday Singh as the man who leads Leone into the lion’s den (so to speak) plays a role akin to Abhishek Bachchan’s in “Dhoom 2”. But a lot more angst-ridden.
He’s a man who falls in love with the honeytrap. Singh is not fully able to express the character’s emotional turmoil. He is far more in control doing action scenes.
Finally the film belongs to Randeep Hooda. As an assassin on the brink who recites Ghalib in a voice that poets would envy, plays the cello and allows the woman he loves to lead him to destruction, Hooda brings to his part a lacerated hurt and a resonant retributive glory. If only Hooda had taken off all those religious rings in his finger. They don’t go with his character.
The passion-play is underpinned by a whole lot of evocative background songs and on-screen poetic utterances that remind us of the close relationship between violence and art.
What segregates the outcast from the messiah is the way the talent of self-expression is channelised.
Hooda’s character, Kabir is genius gone the wrong way.
More dreamy than steamy, “Jism 2” takes us far beyond the body experience into three tortured souls looking for sensual salvation.
Pooja Bhatt delivers a good-looking film with an arresting inner lifewith brilliance and good directing.
But those who feel life in the movies is not always about the good times, “Jism 2” makes its point forcibly. (IANS)