Saturday, June 28, 2014
Ek Villain
The Bad
And The Ugly
Early in
Mohit Suri’s Ek Villain, a gangster
called Guru, brutally murders a man by burning him alive in the midst of a
crowd consisting of his mother and brother. All in a day’s work, not even the
cops bat an eyelid. He is the leading man of the film (played by Sidharth
Malhotra), so he even has a girl falling in love with him, because she thinks
the killer is cute.
The girl
in question, Aisha (Shraddha Kapoor) is a super-annoying twit, fond of telling
bad jokes and aggressively doing good to show that she is sweet and innocent.
She is also suffering from some terminal illness, so a lot of footage is wasted
on her bucket list, that includes playing with a butterfly and seeing peacocks
dance. (Aaargh!)
Then,
there is the Villain of the title, Rakesh (Riteish Deshmukh), who has a nagging
wife (Aamna Sharif), so he kills any woman who is rude to him, and robs her. He
has a friend (Kamaal R Khan), who cackles at the psychopath’s antics and asks
why he didn’t kill his wife too—the wife he slaps around, because that’s how
middle class men vent their frustration, according to him.
If all
this isn’t idiotic or odious enough, Suri overcooks the plot with melodrama and
a some twisted revenge and redemption nonsense, with a cop (Shaad Randhawa) and
a don (Remo Fernandes—hilariously bad) as bystanders.
The film
is lifted from a horribly violent Korean film, Kim Jee-woon’s I Saw The Devil, which didn’t turn
cartwheels trying to justify the serial killer’s motives, didn’t waste time
over a romance, and didn’t have a gangster as the protagonist, which makes you
wonder how come a killer is the good guy you are supposed to root for. It’s not
even as if Suri was trying to make a point about the nature of evil, all that
verbiage his characters expend amounts to a lot of empty sound. The music
(Ankit Tiwari) is excellent though, and Riteish Deshmukh steals every scene he
is in—Malhotra with all the growling and teeth gnashing cannot match up.
Labels: Cinemaah
