Meenakshi Rao's Bollywood and Hollywood movie reviews

Cast-  Robbie Amell, Kevin Spacey, Jennifer Garner Rated-  6/10 If you go in for laughs, this one is not a roller-coaster even though Kevin Spacey turns into a cat pretty early in the movie and does unthinkables like puddling his ex-wife’s Bugatti bag, drinking whiskey and doodling around his name with wool strands, getting all bowed up by his daughter and wearing studded pink collars. All this because a cat whisperer feels he needs to spend more time with his daughter and wife who have been waiting for ages to be with him. Not that he has another woman. He has something worse: Work, stardom and the obsession to be the owner of the tallest building in the northern hemisphere. He is a jet-setter who has no time for anyone but this building, not even his son who joins his company merely to be with him, and be like him both of which he doesn’t manage to do till the climax. The film, with all the ex-wife woes, the step-daughter angst, the cats and dogs and a company tr...

Cast-  Robbie Amell, Kevin Spacey, Jennifer Garner Rated-  6/10 If you go in for laughs, this one is not a roller-coaster even though Kevin Spacey turns into a cat pretty early in the movie and does unthinkables like puddling his ex-wife’s Bugatti bag, drinking whiskey and doodling around his name with wool strands, getting all bowed up by his daughter and wearing studded pink collars. All this because a cat whisperer feels he needs to spend more time with his daughter and wife who have been waiting for ages to be with him. Not that he has another woman. He has something worse: Work, stardom and the obsession to be the owner of the tallest building in the northern hemisphere. He is a jet-setter who has no time for anyone but this building, not even his son who joins his company merely to be with him, and be like him both of which he doesn’t manage to do till the climax. The film, with all the ex-wife woes, the step-daughter angst, the cats and dogs and a company tr...

Cast-  Nathan Jones, Tiger Shroff, Jacqueline Fernandez Rated-  5.5/10 You would have thought, here comes another one of those  desi  mismatch superheroes who sing, dance and do pretty much that superheroes are not supposed to do. Yes, they do save lives but after quite some filmi  fuss. A  Flying Jatt  is pretty much the same but somehow this one grows on you slowly and steadily, scraping out your reservations to all kinds of non-Hollywood superbeings. The best thing about this film is the choreography and considering that Remo’s the name of the game here, it is pretty much the gamechanger. Not just Tiger Shroff’s incredibly slick dancing maneouvres but also the action scenes come in utmost polish. Remo’s seen to that to the last detail and that makes up for all the song and dance, which, one must stress is a delight to watch so excellently they’ve been set up, almost like a top-run dance show. Other than that, Shroff’s coming of age as a bu...

Cast:  Jonah Hill, Miles Teller Rated:  5/10 This one was meant to be the big one from Hollywood this week but War Dogs, despite carrying the alluring tag of “based on a true story” does not give too much too you. The film centres around two arms dealers who make their millions on fraud, forgery and certain purchasing loopholes in the American Army. Add their genius to the on-going Iraq War and Afghanistan misadventure, and Americans needing all kinds of arms for the twin disasters, and the story gets going. Only, it is too American and too flat to really make it to the imagination quotient of audiences worldwide. Despite the two main protagonists going illegally to flashpoints like Baghdad and then to the underbelly of a broken and war-damaged Albania, there is little to offer to the story to the pace and meat of the story that one knows rocked America in real life not too far back into the past. Can be missed as a money saver. Source:  Sunday Pioneer, 21 A...

Cast:  Bryce Dallas Howard, Oakes Fegley, Wes Bentley, Karl Urban, Oona Laurence, Robert Redford Rated:  6/10 Pete’s Dragon, as you must have guessed, is a film for kids. It is cute, it is a story of Mowgli kid and his dragon friend, it is a story of many stories put together — and if you must, there is good old (very old and unkempt actually) Robert Redford in it! First about the computer generated flying, mythical, Mr India kind of disappearing-at-will dragon. He is completely round faced and despite his below average looks, takes your heart. So, the VFX team needs a pat on the back for making an ordinary-faced dragon make impact. Then there is this kid who gets abandoned on a deep forest road after an accident in which his parents die but he is left untouched and undiscovered for five long years. These five years he spends with this dragon who saves him from hyenas and wolves till he grows up to climb trees and jump of cliffs much like Tarzan. And then comes thi...

Cast : Jack Huston, Toby Kebbell, Rodrigo Santoro, Nazanin Boniadi, Ayelet Zurer, Morgan Freeman Rated:  5/10 The first time I saw Ben Hur, the character, on the big screen was around four long decades ago. That was in the bigger than life movie The 10 Commandments. For those times, it was a grand movie made on a grand scale. It was a rivetting Biblical depiction that soon got the classic cult. Many Ben Hurs from Hollywood have come and gone in the intervening years, most of them not really making an impact that would stay forever or even for a long time. Now comes yet another one, named to the point — Ben Hur. The stage is somewhat grand this time too but the story, very very sadly, gets shrunk into a mere chariot race in the end. You could blame it on the over-dependence of CGIs. It’s almost like a modern day car race, only with horses harnessed to chariots. Jack Huston as Judas Ben Hur is modest. Just when Jesus is happening to Jerusalem, his adopted brother is happe...

Cast:  Diana Penty, Abhay Deol, Jimmy Shergill, Ali Fazal, Momal Sheikh Rated:  6.5/10 The very Punjabi runaway bride is on a romp here and with the very delectable Abhay Deol, the master of undertone. The film, as expected, is halki-phulki romantic comedy on either side of the border. The Pakistani nuances, the tenor across the border, the pithy perceptions about each other and the ambience of Lahore and Amritsar are well cooked up. Any movie with this title has to be brazenly funny but Happy Bhag Jayegi is funny only in spurts. Despite that, it is engaging as the director has successfully caught on to funny one-liners and observations about Pakistan and India in the most subtle way possible. Kanwajit, the bride’s father, for example, says (Ajeeb country hai yeh (Pakistan). Yahan bina goli chalaye koi kisi ki sunta hi nahi) sums it up with a swish of humour. Piyush Mishra as the Pakistani policeman who is forced to take a bus to India by budding politician Abhay D...

Cast : Hrithik Roshan, Pooja Hegde, Kabir Bedi, Nitish Bharadwaj, Arunoday Singh, Suhasini Mulay Rated : 4/10 If there was ever an expansive, expensive, grand and kingsize waste on the big screen it is Mohenjo Daro. The grandeur is always a given in any Ashutosh Gowarikar film and this one was no exception.  Big star, sets that can take your breath away and action sequences reeking of CGIs are all there and in good style. But that’s that. Beyond the empty grandeur, there’s nothing more in the film and even the star power of a Hrithik Roshan dancing and fighting his way through river tsunamis, old-time power games, court intrigues and, of course romance, fails to lift up this empty love story set in the times of an ancient civilisation on which we have grown up through school textbooks. If it was meant to be a romance, there is zero chemistry between Hrithik and his delightfully beautiful leading lady Pooja Hegde. If it was about an ancient power struggle, despite Kabir Be...

Cast : Akshay Kumar, Ileana D'Cruz, Arjan Bajwa, Esha Gupta Rated : 7/10 The Kawas Manekshaw Nanavati saga was so compelling on its own that any cinematic effort, even if mediocre, is bound to have engrossing drama in it. The same goes for Rustom, the latest from Bollywood on this 1959 murder case that caught the imagination of the nation when an upright, young Naval officer shot his friend at point-blank range after discovering that he was having an affair with his wife. For starters, Akshay Kumar as Rustom drives the movie with his straight-cut act which hinges more on his poker-faced presence than on any OTT histrionics, despite the circumstances warranting the latter. He looks very much like the Nanavati of yore. He acts like him too though despite being a Parsi in the 1950s, he has no telling accent. The film is driven by him and a twist in the plot which depicts corruption at high places. Though there is a disclaimer at the very beginning, more than 80 per cent of t...

Cast : Matt Damon, Tommy Lee Jones, Alicia Vikander, Vincent Cassel, Julia Stiles Rated : 8.7/10 Edgy, accelerative at all times, merging past and present with finesse — this fourth one from the Bourne family is packed with action, a true entertainer and a film full of tension-propelled lure. CIA operative and engineered killing machine of a rogue and secret programme, Jason Bourne is back in full splendour here. Only, this time, he is more enigmatic but much less clueless about his modified origins and the reason for his existence. Punching his fists at secret street fight arenas on restive international borders, he makes a covert living with “surviving another day” as his only and perennial target till a former woman operative digs through some classified information which suggests his father was killed in Beirut before he gave his only son up to be messed up by the CIA’s lab monsters. As Bourne hops continents and cities with CIA chief Dewey (a much wrinkled and unscrupu...

Cast : Will Smith, Jared Leto, Margot Robbie, Joel Kinnaman Rated : 6/10 The bad men and women are at the helm here and this film tells you how bad can be beautiful, how villainy can be the driving force behind heroics. Not because there is any transformation to goodness but because they are so delectably evil that you kind of get mesmerised by their overt badness of being. Of course, once these super villains are taken out of suggestively torturous jails and packed off on a mission to kill a 6,000-year-old witch residing in the body of a groovy lady archaeologist, you know you are in for some fun — big, bad fun in a big, bad, impudent world. Yes, there are Batman and Superman too, but the heroes are only in the background with killers on the romp. The CGIs are adequately placed as are the wry dialogues which get immersed in a whole lot of OTT guns and bullets action drama. The most delightful of the evil lot is a psychiatrist-turned-lover girl of a dreadful mental asylum i...