Meenakshi Rao's Bollywood and Hollywood movie reviews

Starring : Emraan Hashmi, Vidya Balan, Rajesh Sharma, Namit Das Rated : 2/10 What was that? And pray, why?  Ghanchakkar  is really a rigmarole which has no reasonable beginning and quite a crazy end. Imagine a thriller without a twist in the tale and an end where nothing changes since the beginning of it all! Add to all these unhappening happenings a loud, crazily dressed, fat Punjabi girl as a housewife who caricaturises all Punjabans. Vidya Balan wears brown contact lenses, wears out of box, garish clothes and rubs lotion on her plump limbs every single night. The husband cringes everytime, drinks red wine, mixes it with a strange pill and then goes to bed with his wife wearing a polka dot night suit! And if this does not defy conventional logic, there’s a bank robbery too, an amnesia which can’t really be explained medically and the loss of Rs 35 crore around which the entire film revolves. In that jacket, you could call it a thriller but then where were the thr...

The Heat Starring  Sandra Bullock, Melissa McCarthy Rated : 5/10 Sandra Bullock is vintage FBI in this one too but the frills and the thrills here are somewhat toned down.Plagued by singlehood since childhood, the Yale grad is the butt of all scorn in a male-dominated department where she is looking for a promotion against all odds. Her fellow agents thinks she is some iron hotpants who needs a romp in the bed to soften up. Others see her as a pompous, attitudinal woman cop. All this is true about her persona but Bullock uses these props to hide her insecurities — till, of course, she meets up with a foul-tongued, oversized woman detective in an assignment in Boston. Together the two script a film which is full of womanese and caricatured men, including the albino in the DEA. Trying to smoke out a druglord who kills, maims and burns his detractors, there is very less in the film to call it a viable chase. It is more about the budding relationship the two mismatched wome...

Hummingbird Starring : Jason Statham, Agata Buzek, Vicky McClure, Benedict Wong Rated: 2/10 Jason Statham is only about rippling muscles ripping apart every animate and inanimate thing coming his way. He is about action, pure unconcealed unstoppable action. So, why an actor with this sterotype, even attempt to play an ex-Army, drunken loser in the mean streets of London? Ask the director, and there is hundred per cent chance he will say he too has no idea whatsoever. If he is candid, he will admit he has erred in not just making such a hapless movie, but also in casting someone so much of a misfit as Statham in such a role. In the entire film, he raises his hand not more than thrice and is involved in no car chases, no smashing up things or flying off buildings. All he does is drink himself to death, work as a backhand in a restaurant kitchen, do odd jobs for Chinese goons and look for a mystery woman’s killer, besides romancing a Russian nun for reasons best known to him...

World War Z Starring: Brad Pitt, Mireille Enos, James Badge Dale, Matthew Fox Rated: 4.5/10 Do zombie movies need a premise? Apparently not, if you were to go by Brad Pitt’s latest in the line —  World War Z . The scary thing here is not the fact that the entire human race is turning into convulsing, carnivorous zombies. What is scarier is that they become zombies with no reasons given or found. The focus here is more on Pitt and his mission to save the world rather than on the fast growing zombie population devouring the planet. But despite his journey from New York to South Korea to Jerusalem to finally Scotland and back in search of a cure neither he nor anyone else explains convincingly how the ‘zombie’ virus has infected the world population. There is some mumbo jumbo about India being the  originator of this uncontrollable mess, but Pitt and the movie fails to tap the source too! The scare element, essential to propel any kind of zombie fare on screen, kind o...

Raanjhanaa Starring: Dhanush, Sonam Kapoor, Abhay Deol, Swara Bhaskar Rated: 5.5/10 It’s not the usual Bollywood kind of love story. No badtameez dil beating up a frenzy here. No saans mein teri saans ki khushboo emanating from lovelorn lovers. No Kolaveri Di of a spurned lover. And definitely no Tanu marrying Manu, or thinking of it even once.   Yet, it is a compelling romance, a love story of full surrender, no ego and complete emotion. It is small-town, it is passionate and it is full of moments we have forgotten ever existed in a romance. And Dhanush, as the Benarasi launda of a Tamil pundit, is quite the boy he is made out to be — delightfully real, delightfully apt and delightfully small town. He talks of wrist cutting and cuts them too, he takes 17 slaps to win over the affection of his girl, he waits for her for years and does not give up when she fails to recognise him after her return from JNU and its syrupy student politics. Not just him, even...

Now You See Me Starring : Jesse Eisenberg, Mark Ruffalo, Woody Harrelson, Isla Fisher Rated: 5.5/10 On a week when two big movies bomb all over your patience limit, this one saves the evening. Yes, it does take some time to grow on you, but once the unlikely thriller gets going, it is really what it deals with — magic. Eisenberg, who once played Mark Zuckerberg to perfection, is a master magician here who, along with three others, does an amazing show in Vegas, staging bank robberies as far away as in Paris — live and and from that stage. Though the role of Morgan Freeman is not too fleshed out, the suspense holds on till the last and that’s what gives you that edge on your seat. It’s a pacey movie which gives you no time to think or catch what the FBI deems the most innovative heists in the world. Source: Sunday Pioneer, June 9, 2013

After Earth Starring : Jaden Smith, Will Smith, Sophie Okonedo Rated: 3/10 It would be unwarranted indulgence towards M Night Shyamalan to suggest that he should have had the sixth sense to not make  After Earth . The direct, more candid suggestion would be to ask where the heck did his common sense vanish while he was attempting to mount the most inane, stuck-up spatial sci-fi in a long-long while. After Earth  fails to show pretty much anything that makes for a sustainable film — its emotions are wrongly undertoned, action is missing in action, adventure is as flat as Katirna Kaif’s stomach (without the same allure of course) and its pace seems to have been heavily drugged to unexplained paralysis — like the one the otherwise happening Will Smith suffers in most of the movie. As he gets hurt in a crash-landing on demonised, uninhabitable Earth where killer fauna rule the domain, he also keeps drugging himself to escape the manual bypass he does on her broken leg...

YAMLA PAGLA DEEWANA 2 Starring : Dharmendra, Sunny Deol, Bobby Deol, Neha Sharma Rated: 3/10 What can one say, except — exaggeration, thou art  Yamla, Pagla, Diwana ! Out of sync, terribly misplaced and the worst from the Deols is here along with its mish-mash characters to jolt you into lunacy — not the one that makes you laugh, but the one that makes you cry, especially if you feel for the good old Dharmendra who has been so short-shrifted by director Sangeeth Siwan that even the orangutan gets to do better things than him in the movie. Why the good old, now London-based Sunny Deol, who is known to have literally chased away two-bit producers from exploiting Dharmendra’s weakness for the liquid diet in real life, would allow him to drink himself to death in the film and come out as real as he can get, defies all explanations. At least, in real life, he is not reduced to drinking with an orangutan — in  YPD2 , he is so unemployed that this is all he does. No one ...

Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani Starring : Ranbir Kapoor, Deepika Padukone, Kalki Koechlin, Aditya Roy Kapur Rated: 8/10 Move over critical snobs, this one is absolutely not for you. It is for those pulsating hearts that miss a beat every time they meet up with a real, syrupy romance. It is about an unabashed and unapologetic  badtameez dil — badtameez , in an endearing kind of way, not in an uncouth kind of way. It is about one crackling romance. It is about umpteen moments between a groovy Bunny and a delectable  chushmish . Nothing new, you might say. Wrong guys, this is Ranbir Kapoor we are talking about — a star son who draws life from  raftaar,  an actor who throws up intensity from deep within his eyes. So whether it is about Jordan Negative, or a callow Sid, or a simple salesman, or an ever-optimistic deaf and dumb person, or, for that matter, a boy who makes girls run after him by just being himself, it is the excellence of Ranbir’s histrionics, the natur...

Hangover part III Starring : Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, Zach Galifianakis, Justin Bartha, Ken Jeong Rated: 3/10 I  personally want Mike Tyson’s  paaltu  tiger (remember  Hangover ?) to come and make a meal out of these four friends. They suck as never before and they have committed the crime of turning a rip-roaring, never-before comedy into an extremely tedious soiree, high on nuisance, low on fun and completely devoid of anything close to being comic. If it was not so annoying, it would have been embarrassing to see these four going back to Vegas with no mirth in their baggage. From the time the head of a hapless giraffe goes flying into the windscreen of an equally hapless motorist on a freeway, you know how cruelly the franchisee has ejected the advantage the brand of Hangove r had inadvertently given them. If  Hangover II  was a mistake,  Hangover III  is a blatant crime, a heinous one at that. Cannot be forgiven even if Doug has ...

Fast and Furious 6 Starring : Dwayne Johnson, Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Luke Evans Rated: 7.5/10 Well, well, well — here the speedometer races across 900 miles an hour, and still doesn’t show any signs of exploding! Yet there are many explosions in  F&F6 . Here, the muscles explode, the rides explode, the buildings explode and the good old Russian war plane also explodes. Amid all this, there is also an explosion of familial sentimentality, of loyalty, of friendship and of a love that returns with no memory of Dom’s syrupy relationship of the past. To build all this family drama on a fast and furious car chasing, crime chasing criminal gang and a top cop trying to defy gravity in almost all sequences is a brilliant job done. Vin Diesel and his troupe are in top performance gear, chasing a former Brit Army rogue trying to steal some computer chip that will do America huge loss. But the film is not fleshed out on this villain’s villainy. It is purely pivotal on Dom’s lov...