Meenakshi Rao's Bollywood and Hollywood movie reviews

Dhoom 3 Starring:  Aamir Khan, Abhishek Bachchan, Uday Chopra, Katrina Kaif Rated:  8/10 You thought  Dhoom3  would have a hard time competing with its predecessors; you thought there could not be anyone more dishy than Aryan of  Dhoom   2 ; you thought the bikes couldn’t get slicker than the ones vrooming onto the big screen in  Dhoom ; you even thought that Uday Chopra would change, that Abhishek Bachchan would work a wee bit on his trademark swagger and that this YRF franchise, too, could not be anything more than bikes, bods and babes swishing from Mumbai to London and to Brazil. Well, you thought wrong, entirely wrong. Because, the latest edition of this young speed wonder comes in a whole new avataar, this time all the way from a carefully filmed Chicago. If the original  Dhoom  was a tentative experiment in importing Hollywood’s heist thrills to Bollywood, mounted on the muscle bubbling anatomy of John Abraham and his swi...

What The Fish Starriing : Dimple Kapadia, Manu Rishi Chadha, Manjot Singh, Anand Tiwari, Sheeba Shabnam Rated:  5.5/10 What the Fish!  This one is full of promise and promises continue to dog you all through this now-interesting-now-promising film on an inane, run-of-the-mill situation. Dimple Kapadia, seen on screen after a pretty long long break, does a pretty good job as an ageing wife of a man who stares you down from a photo frame — and of course all the angst and abuses that the poor little still man hears from his wife from up there on the wall. The film, about Dimple’s house keys being given to a no-good caretaker whom she considers a bad suitor of her niece, looks sneakingly familiar to an old Hollywood movie but what the fish. Lifts are in vogue today — and in all forms! So, all the activity that goes on unhindered in this house behind Dimple’s back — which she says is allergic to anyone touching her bedspread or using her toilet (where she washes and...

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug Starring : Ian McKellen, Martin Freeman, Richard Armitage, Benedict Cumberbatch, James Nesbitt, Orlando Bloom Rated : 6.5/10 Hollywood has the knack of making you inordinately interested in overt make-believe. This  Hobbit , the second in a three-part series, holds you in your seat not by imposing visuals which are so much of a signature tune of such fantasy ventures but also due to the thriller sequence of events, many months after the first one in the series too wowed the audiences with its towering graphics and fertile imagination. This time round the mission is even tougher so thrills many more. Hobbit, the thief, has to steal a white sparkling stone for the dwarf king from right under the nose of the fire dragon. The journey is full of pitfalls as deep as the gorges and jungles these dwarfs have to pass in order to get their land and kingdom back. The desolation of Smaug is their only option to survival with the dark clouds of a ...

R...Rajkumar Starring:  Shahid Kapoor, Sonakshi Sinha, Sonu Sood Rated:  1/10 Silent  ho ja  Shahid,  varna main  violent  ho jaoongi!  Yes, it makes you that desperate — this horrifying attempt at movie-making, this insulting the intelligence of the audience, this non-story story, this cacophony that bursts your eardrums and this mish-mash of nonsense that annoys you enough to tear your hair in frustration. That one mark you see up there is for sheer indulgence for poor little Shahid Kapur trying so hard to be accepted as a  goonda mawali  with a stubble and all that unkemptness that surrounds our screen desperadoes.  Gandi baat  Shahid! You can’t expect us to not say “uggh” to your slurpy attempt at romancing Sonakshi in this one. Actually, you could have been booked for sexual harassment, intimidation, stalking, and eve-teasing all in one go had you stepped out of the screen in the mode that you appear in  R…R...

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire Starring:  Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Liam Hemsworth, Elizabeth Banks, Stanley Tucci, Donald Sutherland Rated:  8/10 Katniss Everdeen is back and in style, defying all doom talk not just about her existence in Panem but also in a sequel that turns out to be fiery enough to hold you by your breath — at least for a major part of the second part in the  Hunger Games  trilogy. It is totally to the credit of Everdeen and her gripping presence on screen that the sequel defeats all pitfalls, including the bloodbath (delightfully measured) second hunger games themselves. It is dark, it is haunting, the 12th District and the rest of them all are equally distraught and President Snow is older and more sinister than usual, gunning for Katniss and her growing popularity as the freshest hope for revolution. If the  Hunger Games  took away your breath by their bloodthirstiness pegged on children killing each other to ...

Gori Tere Pyar Mein Starring:  Imran Khan, Kareena Kapoor Khan, Shraddha Kapoor Rated:  5/10 The  badi  meets  chhota  syndrome has become a frequent flyer not just with Bollywood but also on the small screen. And, considering that the age gap between Imran Khan and Kareena Kapoor had been well established in their previous film  Ek Main Aur Ek Tu , this one has done well to give public memory and the age gap issue a further push. The film though is a slow starter and continues to be that all through the two-and-a-half hours that it takes to establish the fact that Kareena is now a begum sahiba  and even if she does the  latka jhatkas chewing gum chaba ke , she is cautious about not revealing too much. Other than that, Imran Khan is his usual self, dancing awkwardly (giving Sunny Deol some moments of feeling good about his own dancing), and carrying on a romance the modern way — without much of a hungama . In this one, he is...

Singh Saab The Great Starring:  Sunny Deol, Amrita Rao, Urvashi Rautela, Prakash Raj Rated:  5/10 The dhai kilo ka haath  has added weight and is now  sadhey teen kilo ka haath!  Time, too has passed into newer pastures and perceptions since Sunny paaji last visited the Indian screen in right earnestness. So, the film looks somewhat out of sync — a 70s thingy in the new millennium. There’s a Bihari  raja saheb  going after an upright collector. The revenge for locking his factory and asking him to pay up his tax arrears is rather drastic — a murder, a long jail term and an incredible  badlaav . But in all this call for change — one thing remains constant — Sunny Deol’s  maar dhaad, his bad dancing and his blood curdling yells against injustice. He says and does things in all the vigour but somehow the world has moved on from such drastic revenge thrillers. It’s the age of Twitter and Facebook and injustices of this huge kind are ...

Last Vegas Starring:  Michael Douglas, Robert De Niro, Morgan Freeman, Kevin Kline Rated:  6/10 Read the above starcast. Could it have gotten any bigger than this? Naaa! Could it have become any less engaging? Naaa! Last Vegas  gives you a heady punch, an all-inclusive ride to gratifying star power. Yes, the formerly ageless Michael Douglas looks too wrinkled post his cancer recuperation but that hasn’t dented his screen presence. And he’s here as the buddy of no less a star than Robert De Niro, flanked by an out-to-have-fun-with-alcohol Morgan Freeman and out-to-have-fun-with viagra-and-condoms (with his wife’s permission) Kevin Kline! No, it’s not yet another  Hangover  in an old guise though there is an impending marriage, four friends on a bachelor roll and Las Vegas’ drunken parties. But this is about De Niro and Douglas and Kline and Freeman — oldies out to have their last hurrah. It’s not meant to be serious so it’s aptly not. It’s not meant t...

Satya2 Starring:  Puneet Singh Ratn, Anaika Soti, Aradhna Gupta Rated:  4/10 Ram Gopal Varma weaved some stunning magic with Satya, setting quite a high standard for the bhai log movies on which many others tried to shape their ventures. Satya was an iconic film, almost perfect, comprehensive, edgy, emotional, stunning, violent and slick all at one go. It established Ram Gopal Varma’s name in the industry in such concrete terms that all his misadventures in the following decades still did not diminish his fame with this genre. He consolidated his magic with Company which was another gem from the Varma closet, for some even better than Satya. For me though, all the song and dance and simple relationships that he clothed in Satya were the most memorable and Varma’s best ever. By dishing out Satya2, Varma has done best what he has been doing ever since Satya and Company. He has worked hard at undoing any support he may still have had left among his audience not just a...

Thor: The Dark World Starring:  Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman, Tom Hiddleston, Anthony Hopkins, Stellan Skarsgård Rated:  5/10 Eighth from the Marvel Comics stock, this one carries on the legacy of Thor though the ring of familiarity breeds a little bit of contempt.  Contempt as in you know whats coming, including the dashing hammer that keep flying into the hands of the superhero at apt times. Thor 2 is glorious though just too whiny about having lost his lady love to Mother Earth. Anthony Hopkins as the Asgard king is imposing, laconic and captivating. The story remains the same — saving an attack of the dark forces who have risen yet again from the belly of the galaxy, this time to plunge into ultimate darkness Mother Earth, and of course to down Asgard and rule the universe. The device to do this is an amoebic gaseous force which has been unleashed after eons of being trapped in a spatial boulder — accidentally freed by Thor’s love interest who is an astr...

Krrish 3 Starring:  Hrithik Roshan, Priyanka Chopra, Kangna Ranaut, Vivek Oberoi, Rajpal Yadav, Mohnish Behl Rated:  7/10 Ok guys, it is a different Krrish this time — handsome of course, but more importantly, renewed by technology, quite splashy with his antics and totally fabulous in the VFX zone. But in all this splashy splendour orchestrated in minutest detail by Rakesh Roshan over three years, also lies a slight problem — all this Hollywood makeover, this wide-angled pan shots which you see in movies like  Jurassic Park , this heart-stopping highrise jumps and the gravity defying aerial antics, somehow, take away from the human element in the film. Even Spiderman has to go through some emotional ones but Hrithik, the chiselled body wonder in this one, somehow sleepwalks through this aspect, this Diwali. Yes, he is stunning, becoming and what not and also lives up to being a superhero but there is very little of him in the film. His water-dangling green eyes...

Mickey Virus Starring:  Manish Paul, Elli Avram, Manish Choudhary, Varun Badola, Puja Gupta, Nitish Pandey Rated:  5/10 If you have been one of those couch potatoes getting high on the Manish Paul antics, over-the-top anchoring and general fooling around on the small screen, you might like his 70mm version instantly. If not, and if you are a discerning cinema viewer, you will see the many viruses plaguing this maiden upload by this budding TV star. First, and just for clarity, this one is not a comedy but a thriller. However, because Mr Paul’s image is highly induced with tomfoolery, director Saurav Verma does the comic relief as starters and gives you a main course of a modern thriller around hackers, dirty money and shadowy figures — from faceless power brokers in the portals of power to law enforcers, the taint is flying all around. In fact, it is a pretty tight plot which, strangely, loses it without notice and gains it back with equal brevity. Hanging around t...

The Fifth Estate Starring:  Benedict Cumberbatch, Daniel Brühl, Anthony Mackie, David Thewlis Rated:  5/10 As WikiLeaks was all about Julian Assange,  The Fifth Estate  is all about Benedict Cumberbatch. Hold on, wasn’t that the baddie in the latest  Star Trek  mount? There, he made a huge impact and here too, as Assange, he takes all your applause. He simmers, explodes and generally blows you away by his dogged, devious but determined demeanour which leaves you definitely uncomfortable about being with a fellow so silently ferocious. Apparently, in real life, Assange is said to be pretty much the same though he has been highly critical of the film which shows him up as an unscrupulous revolution maker leaking classified documents which rocked Governments all over world — all the way up from the US. But sadly, there is not much about the history of  WikiLeaks here or how the story unfolded for this website which was new and beyond any form of...

Boss Starring: Akshay Kumar, Mithun Chakravorty, Aditi Rao Hyadiri & others Rated: 4/10 They will all wear white, because Boss is always right.’ Right? Wrong, very wrong actually! For, Akshay may be on a roll here, trying to cash in on his earlier body of work, but he takes the film into all kinds of dark tunnels from where there is no possibility of a sane emergence. Director Anthony D’Souza has tried hard to bring out a Singham from within a Dabangg and even a Rowdy Rathore from within a Joker, but despite all the silly dialogues, the exaggerated comic relief, the swagger of Akshay himself and somewhat well choreographed fight sequences, there is very little to write home about. Of course, in all such movies meant for the paisa phenk, front-row rowdy audiences, this one too has no time or place for any kind of punctuations. That’s ok, but one has to grow up from the 80s mould of film-making and package it differently to make some eyeballs steady on to the screen. ...

Shahid Starring:  Raj Kumar Yadav Rated:  6/10 It is a tricky world that this real-time film courageously propels. And one must say that it makes quite a mark on you, thanks mainly to its main protagonist Raj Kumar Yadav who plays a do-good lawyer who fights for the acquittals of innocent Muslims arrested under TADA. In real life, Shahid Azmi was gunned down in his office in a Mumbai suburb by till now unknown assailants. His death, a shocker for Mumbai, came on the heels of yet-to-be identified threat-makers who wanted him to drop the cases he was fighting.  The film, produced by thinking men of Bollywood (Ronnie Screwallah and Anurag Kashyab among others), is to the point, perfectly ambienced and taut enough to get you all emotional about a life needlessly axed. Yadav is the life of the film and he plays the role of a misguided Muslim youth picked up as a terror suspect, tortured, jailed and then released for lack of evidence despite a brief stint of terror ...

CAPTAIN PHILLIPS Starring: Tom Hanks, Barkhad Abdi Rated: 9/10 The Somalian pirates have been making news off and on, but, without making waves despite operating on the high seas. However, Captain Phillips will change all that. For, this Hollywood film is a powerful, edge-of-the-seat drama on a real-life incident in which an American cargo ship captain is kidnapped by young, two-bit Somalian pirates demanding $10 million in return. The film, besides the signature performance of Tom Hanks, is a powerful depiction of how prized a single American life is for the US Government. A unit of US precision target Seals is airdropped into the troubled waters of Somalia all the way from America to save this American aam aadmi and the way they orchestrate the surrender and a rescue mission (and I am not saying this because the Seal skipper is just too groovy) is very tautly unfolded on screen. Captain Phillips being a real flesh and blood man, who, we are told, is now back at sea desp...

Escape plan Starring: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Jim Caviezel Rated: 6/10 Jailbreaks have been staple for dream merchants but this one comes riding piggyback on two hulks of, well, can we say, the bygone era? So, when Sly meets Arnie behind bars, there can’t be any hope of saving a jailbreak even though the director tries his best to make the jailor look deadly with his freezing-and-mounting butterflies penchant. But wait, there’s a twist here, and I am not talking just about showing the good side of a jihadi! For starters, Stallone is no offender but a security expert whose sole job is to get into prisons and break out of them merely to test their safety quotients! Untill, he is sent in on the sly by his business partner for some humongous amount of money. The deal is to never let him come out! A middle-of-nowhere, floating, illegal prison with no record of existing is the last thing Stallone would have wanted to go into but he does and that’s that! A bit...

War chhod na yaar Starring: Javed Jaffrey, Sharman Joshi, Soha Ali Khan Rated: 3/10 All this aman ki aasha effort that a dapper Captain Sharman Joshi and a misplaced journalist Soha Ali try and orchestrate on the big, bad border booming with guns and rockets is quite overtly misplaced.  For one, it is a very childlike effort, too simplistic, without the promised laughs and with no ripples whatsoever. yes, Jaffrey as a Pakistani ranger does throw in some good reasons to laugh but those ones don’t hold the movie together for a long time.even the attempted spoof on Pakistan’s mismanaged affairs and their penchant for constant war against India are something like a fairytale for infants. All the antaksharis and the bonhomie that leads the Pakistanis stationed across the concertina wire does not give health to the film that had come in with a lot of promise in  week that had no competition. Why then would it become such a flob show is anybody’s guess. Source: Sunday Pi...

Gravity Starring: Sandra Bullock, George Clooney Rated: 9/10 Gravity is a marvel suspended in space, a rarest of rare gem that holds you in total thrall; a spartan wonder keeping you on the edge of your seat all through the one-and-a-half hours. Considering space is all about an endless dark dominion, there are quite a few paradoxes mounted beautifully on this short and stunning piece of cinematographic poetry directed by Alfonso Cuaron. Imagine a spatial odyssey shot in the most constricted space of a satellite module floating some 400 miles above a picture perfect Earth! Mounted impeccably on 3D FX, it is a matter of intense applause for Alfonso’s underrated genius that he could hold your unwavering attention with just two persons on the screen all through, with one of them drifting away into nothingness very early into the film. Astronaut Sandra  Bullock, the only human on the screen for most part of the film, involves you inexorably in her fight for survival amid unexpecte...

Besharam Cast: Ranbir Kapoor, Pallavi Sharda, Rishi Kapoor, Neetu Singh and Jaaved Jaaferi Ratings: 4/10 If the youthful exuberance of Ranbir Kapoor, his above average histrionic abilities, his screen presence, his Midas touch and his drop dead looks fail to save a film, there must be something really really wrong with either the script or the direction. In the case of Besharam, it is a little bit of both. For one, not every film can be put into the master mould of Dabangg for it to work even if the director happens to be the same bloke. Why Ranbir would sign a film so obviously slim on a story is bewildering, considering that, so far, the lad has stood out in Bollywood for being different and choosing differently. Besharam is gauche and a wee bit unhinged, and that despite the comeback couple Rishi and Neetu Kapoor living it up as Chulbul and Bulbul Chautala. But the audience need more than just a family reunion and much more than mere attempted hilarity. And as the ...

Diana Cast:  Naomi Watts ,  Naveen Andrews ,  Cas Anvar Ratings: 6/10 Much like her life, this film on Princess Diana also deals with many tragedies, the biggest one being an over simplified encapsulation of a very brief period of her life, a period that was very intense, very messed up and ultimately very complex. Actually too complex for the black and white veneer it was made to wear. But that does not take away from your heart going out for the people's princess whose biggest snag in life was her unparalleled fame. "Can a surgery stitch up a broken heart?" She asks her heart doctor plaintively. The film tells you that Dodi Al Fayed was not even a diversion for her. He was merely a ploy for a lovelorn girl trying to make her one and only love in life jealous. Another matter though that all she manages to get from her actual lover boy from Pakistan is a deathly silence and a bigger love in the doc's life, the love for his privacy over his love for Diana. Na...

Runner runner Cast: Justin Timberlake, Ben Affleck Ratings: 3/10 Justin Timberlake, and even Ben Affleck for that,  are capable of better films. Runner runner limits them to a rather unhappening casino thriller unfolding into a mega financial scam in Costa Rica where corruption is the second name to almost everything. From Princeton to the bad alleys of fraudulent money minting, Justin almost sleepwalks through the film, in the end winning eyes closed! In comparison, as the wily and ruthless owner of the casino, The director accords some nuances to Ben's character though that too fails to save the film from ennui. It would have been much more fun had there been more twists and turns, more imaginative sequencing of events, more punctuations in a storyline burdened by inaction. Source: Sunday Pioneer, October 6, 2013

Time out Ratings: 5.5/10 Just when you are about to give up on the potential of this time travel romance with family heartbeats, the story starts unfolding and you rise above the below average looks of the hero and his extraordinary ordinariness. You realise he has a gift that transcends even his rare ability to travel back in time every now and then to reset his future. He is a man with a lot of earnest emotions, gentle humour and kindness, traits that make this movie a puller, may be a late puller but a puller nevertheless. The director does well to keep this one simple, hinged on romance and family woven together beautifully. The pace too is deliciously languid much like the Cornish moorings its draws its locational beauty from. The strength of a mother's character who is about to lose her indispensable husband to cancer is as powerfully portrayed as a dying fathers' love for his son whom he will see for the last time. In short, it is a sensitive story, told sen...

Grand masti Starring:  Vivek Oberoi, Ritesh Deshmukh, Aftab Shivdasani, Sonalee Kulkarni, Bruna Abdullah, Karishma Tanna, Maryam Zakaria, Manjari Fadnis Rated:  5/10 He chants ‘Rose, Mary, Marlow’ pretty often because, he says, once upon a time he had a Laura (his wife)! Then there’s a Hardick too, sometimes condoming umbrellas and sometimes pumping up the jewels in his underpants with a pressure pump! By the way, the bulges are as big under the male bellies as they are over the female stomachs. And there is fizz too, a lot of creamy fizz bubbling out of coke bottles! In between, there is a lot of in-your-face man force, thanks to the main sponsor being a condom company of the same name. Depending on how much of a prude you are, or how much of grossness you are willing to accommodate on a given day, or how much you enjoy the Dada Kondke type of sexing up, the verdict will go either way. If you are cringing already then they had warned you it will come without any f...

John day Starring:  Naseeruddin Shah, Randeep Hooda, Vipin Sharma, Shernaz Patel, Sharat Saxena Rated:  3/10 Naseeruddin Shah bids to do another  A   Wednesday  as  aam   aadmi  taking the law into his hands, this time to avenge his daughter’s death and a fatal attack on his wife.  Sadly, however, while  A Wednesday was a gripping thriller which garnered critical acclaim for not just its novelty of presentation but also the edge-of-the-seat experience it gave to viewers with its slick editing, this one gets warped, mindless and unnecessarily violent. Add to that a plot which is wafer thin and lacking in motive and you have good actors (both Nasser and  Randeep Hooda come across as seasoned) getting mired in a slim story handled slimly by the director.  One may ask why was Hooda who plays a rogue ACP, should be biting off other people’s tongues and dismembering heads after smashing them to pulp. Even Naseeruddin Shah i...