Cinemaah

Come Off It Guys!


It’s shameful that we gloat about being the biggest film industry in the world, and now, with all the money and technology at the successful filmmaker’s disposal, still rip off ideas from 25 (or more) year old Hollywood films.

The funkiness of Vipul Shah’s Action Replayy (idea stolen from the classic Back to the Future) is all in the ads and promos.  The seventies’ psychedelic look is cute in small doses but not when the screen looks like someone poured buckets of primary colours over the frames. The seventies were not the way today’s silly spoofy films are portraying them… only Farah Khan got the retro spoof element right in Om Shanti Om. Now everyone seems to be copying her take, and not doing even doing their own research.

Bunty (Aditya Roy Kapoor) has problem parents, and if has to make a success of his own relationship, he should repair theirs. Easily done… a trip to the past via a time travel machine (Prof Anthony Gonsalves has one handy) and he can go turn his nerdy dad (Akshay Kumar) into a charmer and his tomboyish mom (Aishwarya Rai) into a simperer and make them fall in love.  But how did they get married in the first place, if they didn’t approve of each other?

The film is scripted and directed with such a contempt for detail, flat humour, much noise and not one glorious hear-soaring moment—of which there were plenty in Back to the Future, if only they’d seen the film more carefully and learnt some lessons.

The attractive lead pair, neither a great actor, at least make the film bearable. The rest of the cast Rannvijay, Om Puri, Rajpal Yadav, Kirron Kher, Neha Dhupia, Randhir Kapoor and the rest just go through the (exaggerated) motions. If there’s one word needed to describe the film it would, unfortunately, be tacky.