FILM: Ek Villain
Cast: Siddharth Malhotra, Shraddha Kapoor, Riteish Deshmukh
DIRECTOR: Mohit Suri

Siddharth simmers and scorches the screen with his implosive one man against the world act. As a loner on a rampage after the love of his life is killed, he brings to the table a certain intensity which unfortunately, in this case, can only go this far and no further.
We are looking at a film that is deeply flawed and fatally self-defeating.
Much was expected from director after Aashiqui 2. Alas, Suri chooses to wallow in unnecessary and at times prolonged brutality rather than focus on the tender love story between the seething brute and the bubbly babe.
Not that there is anything new to offer in the love story.
The silent indignant loner and the gregarious chirpy girl next door…haven’t we seen Amitabh Bachchan and Jaya Bhaduri take those two characters to the acme of perfection in Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Mili?
Ek Villain is “Mili” over-heaped with a maelstrom of mayhem, mostly uncalled-for and sometimes atrociously out of place. The action sometimes borders on the utterly ludicrous. This isn’t first time when the director seems to enjoy visualizing the exploits of a sadistic serial killer.
In Murder 2 too, the graphic gruesome killings of the serial offender were recorded with an embarrassing backhanded relish .
The killer in Ek Villain is a henpecked husband moonlighting as a guy who believes if life screws you use a screwdriver to screw other people’s lives.
Providentially, this incoherent serial killer is played by Riteish Deshmukh who interprets the character with more cogency than it demands.
Suri diminishes the brutality of the serial offender by offsetting it with the love story between the criminally inclined introvert(Siddharth) and the sunshine girl(Shraddha) who insists on telling criminally unfunny jokes. Shraddha’s eyes speak volumes. So unfortunately does her mouth in this film. How I wish our cinema would stop equating volubility with vivacity.
More regrettable are the plot’s mood swings. In spite of the tragic overtones the love story never quite acquires the wings that you’d expect a romance between two such good-looking people to. In spite of some beautifully enacted moments of fragile passion between the lead pair, it all comes undone in the second-half when Siddharth and Riteish do a farcical face-off replete with the most atrocious dialogues and scenes that make them look like two school boys fighting over who’s larger.
The sinister often makes way for the silly, specially when musician Remo Fernandes shows up as a gangster replete with an accent that is as hard to identify as the Korean film that Suri has adapted into this strange brew of the brutal and the tender. Even more bizarre Kamaal R Khan playing what looks a jerk with knee-jerk relish.
However Shaad Randhawa playing cop displays a powerful screen presence.
There are many lapses of continuity in the storytelling all trying to pass off as a stylish non-linear love story told backwards.One of the turning points in the story when Siddharth’s character befriends his wife’s killer’s little son in a church, is such a wildly improbable shot in the dark, you wonder what the director was thinking!
In trying for a merger of mayhem and emotions the film finally falls apart like the shattered pieces of a broken heart.
We expect so much and get so little. That’s life. (IANS)

FILM: Machhli Jal Ki Rani Hai
Cast: Swara Bhaskar, Deepraj Rana
DIRECTOR: Debaloy Dey

The horror genre in Bollywood suffers because of its inability to reinvent itself over the years.
Linda Blair played the girl possessed in William Friedkin’s The Exorcist. Forty years later the very talented Swara Bhaskar gives the devilish avatar a try. She works hard on getting the twisted and contorted face and body language right. But Swara, bless her possessed soul, is let down by a tacky script and the director’s inability to take the spooky genre where it hasn’t been before.
It’s all familiar, and not done in any way that can be considered even reasonably original. The supernatural murders attempt to be so gruesome that they end up being unintentionally funny.
A maid (more made-up than her ‘maalkin’) is pierced in her eyes with a hanging on the wall.
Later the hanging reappears on the wall, the blood and gore all washed away.
Admittedly Machhli Jal Ki Rani Hai has some genuinely scary moments. There is a sequence where his wife serving him fish for dinner surprises Swara’s screen-spouse.
Until his eyes fall on the fish tank and he sees their pet fish missing from the tank… Then towards the end there is a twist in the tale, which is bound to send a chill up your spine, regardless of whether you believe in ghosts or not.
The payoff comes too infrequently, and too late.
Most of the plot is covered in what appears to be an occasion to give idle housewives and aspiring actors a chance to play out their acting fantasies.
The dialogues are delivered in unnecessarily loud voices and the sequences pile up one on top of the other without creating any coherent scheme of storytelling. The narrative follows the weather-beaten track of raising scares through shadows and sound effects. If you enjoy watching films about ghostly possessions in normal households then “Machhli Jal Ki…” might of some interest to you. But the horror genre in Bollywood needs a revamp.
As stated earlier the last half-hour when the ghosts go amok as well as the preamble when the exorcist (Deepraj Rana) chases the devil across a dangerous terrain is mildly engaging.(IANS)