Meenakshi Rao's Bollywood and Hollywood movie reviews

Cast:  Manish Paul, Sikander Kher, Piyush Mishra Rated : 5.5/10 Is it anywhere near the original?  Naa...  Not a patch on it. Is it not at all funny? That’s not true either. Could it have been any better? Yes, much much better. Tere Bin Laden 2  came riding on high expectations and, as expected, could not live up to them. But then no sequel ever does. And as far as  TBL 2  goes, even the main character Osama is long dead and thrown into the sea. Hence, the central character is not so much Laden as it is David Do Something, an American Marine assigned the task of proving that Osama is actually dead. Sikander Kher as David is more than brilliant and holds the film together. Osama has few moments as does Manish Paul who plays the film’s director in the middle of all the drama, action, shooting and a fallen brigade of jihadis helmed by Piyush Mishra. A lot happens in this film but much too quickly. It’s more than evident that the slapstick pace is int...

Cast:  Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Brenton Thwaites, Courtney Eaton, Rufus Sewell, Gerard Butler Rated:  6/10 This big canvas fantasy adventure, pegged on Egyptian folklore and celestial beings, is an engaging saga which turns a little bit prolonged by the end of it all. Here, Gods are fighting the rogue God who has the throne of Egypt under his sword after killing his King brother and maiming his heir-apparent nephew forever by swooping out his all-powerful eyes. Or so he thought, till one measly mortal — a thief at that — loses his beloved to her master and bargains with the God in Exile King to give her life back in barter for his eyes which he steals from the rogue King’s vault. Amid all this mumble jumble, the flashy film high on computer imagery and graphic action unfolds interestingly enough to keep you seated through its prolonged journey through well conjured mountains, deserts and heaven, not to mention the ultimate abode of life — the sun. Another matter thou...

Cast:  Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara, Kyle Chandler, Jake Lacy  Rated:  7.5/10 Classified as a love story, this same-sex tag of a romance may sound over indulgent and groovy about lesbian encounters, especially when they are all unfolding in the forbidden age of the 1950s. But it has a story alright — and it’s all about the straight out of Vogue, rich, restless and seasoned Cate Blanchett (Carol) and the gauche, young, hesitant, middle-class salesgirl Rooney Mara (Terese) shacking up together in the face of stiff taboo. The beauty of their slowly unfolding relationship spread around an expansive road trip to the West, is that it is both a counterfoil and a complement in equal measure. Blanchett is more than extra-ordinary in her role of a much married mother of one who has had same-sex flings before, the ultimate lady of the world in her brown fur, red lipstick and a swagger so unique that you might just give her the Oscar for Best Actress. But then there is Roone...

Cast:  Leonardo Di Caprio, Tom Hardy, Will Poulter, Domhnall Gleeson, Lucas Haas Rated:  7/10 It’s a dark, depressing and mostly frigid environment that this film takes you into. To top it, the journey is full of horrors, blood, gore and a burning revenge plan of a half-eaten-by-bear way-scout to travel to the other corner of this unending landscape and kill the murderer of his son. Despite the slow but intense action of a factual story set in the 19th century, despite its lead actor Leonardo Di Caprio not speaking many, or should we say any, dialogues, despite the prolonged and agonising journey that battles the pitfalls of sheer monotony — it grows on you and you want to navigate to the end. Though all the talk of this film based on real character of folklore America, Huge Glass, is about whether this time round — finally — Di Cap will get his much awaited Oscar for Best Actor, one should not take away from the immense work put into this landscape-ridden film by ci...

Cast:  Lily James, Sam Riley, Jack Huston, Bella Heathcote, Douglas Booth, Matt Smith, Charles Dance Rated:  6/10 For one, this a brave film, a very brave attempt to marry the other world with a classic love saga whose bastardisation could have evoked a riot among viewers. But some how, God knows how, this brave and virtually outrageous effort grows on you. I mean, just imagine Mr Darcy engaging more with bloodied zombies than the delightful battle of wits with Elizabeth. Imagine those Bennett sisters wielding swords and pistols and gunning for the ghosts rather than for the delectable and rich boys next door. Imagine London falling to zombies and not to those groovy balls where girls met boys in coy circumstances and diamond-laden mothers got busy making matches with impunity. Yes, unimaginable but  P&P&Z  has its very own charm — the charm of seeing the Bennett sisters fishing out weapons from their suspenders, the warrior girls who can defend the...

Cast : Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams, Michael Keaton Rated:  7/10 When a group of investigative journalists of the  Boston Globe  get down to probing the sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests (70 of them eventually in Boston alone!) and the Church recycling the culprits into the system despite the bigness of their crime, an engaging film like  Spotlight  happens. Spotlight  is not just about the enormity of the issue. It is a hell of a film because it is thorough and because it captures the routineness of the work at hand with amazing alacrity. This, when the investigation itself is as slow as spreading over one whole year. The back and forth, the interviews of the emotional victims, the backgrounding, the digging away, the not breaking with time, the decision to hold on to the story till the system and not just the priests get nailed, and not hyping it at all (actually underplaying it) — is what thorough journalism is all about. All this ma...

Cast : Girish Kumar, Navneet Kaur Dhillon, Naveen Kasturia Rated:  4.5/10 Boy meets girl on his bachelor’s party night. Of course there is  Hangover  but without too much of that kind of fun which no one can forget. Rather, it is eminently forgettable. Of course, there is a quick romp in the bed with the wrong girl but that too is forgotten for some time and the boy does marry the maneater that he shouldn’t have. Of course, there’s a divorce and, of course, boy meets the same girl all over again four years later, this time on her bachelorette party in groovy Mauritius. Of course, there is this thing that this one from the YRF stable is without any star power and that means half the love story gone down the drain. The male lead works very hard to flex his muscles and six pack abs but fails to land a punch either way. The debutant Navneet Dhillon is good looking and has some amount of screen presence but that’s about all there is. In a love story that is predict...

Cast:  Sonam Kapoor, Shekhar Ravjiani, Shabana Azmi Rated : 8/10 She died 30 years ago and in extremely frightful circumstances.  Returned from a Delhi-Karachi-Franfurt-New York hopping flight dead — body riddled with bullets, killed in the crossfire between the hijackers of her Pan Am flight and commandos. Chief Pursur Neerja Bhanot would have celebrated her 24th birthday a few days later that fateful September but that was not to be. She died in harness, trying to save the lives of the 300 plus other passengers. A cinematic tribute to this braveheart would have been a given much, much earlier but it took the film industry three decades to unfold this tale of singular courage. However, after sitting through the film, I would say ‘better late than never’. For, it is a stunning film, mounted on a stunning performance by the much derided Sonam Kapoor. Sonam is Neerja and she lives and dies in her skin. Quite an achievement from a pretty star child who never really ...

Cast : Aditya Roy Kapur, Katrina Kaif, Tabu, Aditi Rao Hydari, Rahul Bhat, Lara Dutta, Ajay Devgn Rated:  6/10 This one comes with great expectations and fails to fulfill them even though Abhishek Kapoor has tried hard to give his tribute to this great classic with a lot of art work. Even though the leads — Aditya Roy Kapoor and Katrina Kaif — have a shortage of expressions, to put it mildly, this one at least is a good looking movie. The locales are stunning, much like Vishal Bhardwaj’s  Haider,  the sequences stitched up with a lot of dress sense and the story laden with a heavy  shairana andaaz. Now this  shairana andaaz  may not go too well with the modernities that afflict the boy from Dal once he leapfrogs from an unknown Kashmiri village to the splashy art world of Delhi, but it does make a statement. And while talking of statements, the biggest one in this movie is made by the queen of the film, Begum Hazrat (Tabu). She is insanely ridden ...

Deadpool Cast:  Ryan Reynolds, Gina Carano, Morena Baccarin, T.J. Miller Rated:  6.5/10 Finally, Marvel Comic’s funny mutant Deadpool gets his very own motion picture and the “bad guy who gets to worse guys” is quite gung-ho with this progression. He is completely masked for most part of the film (I thought suffocatingly so), funny in a way Marvel’s characters are not frequently and has a girlfriend fixation, thus powering all his antics around the big “her”. Of course, he is different from his co-comicons because he has several — and explicit — romps in bed, is kinky and happy to be so. As a former secret service operative who is now doing private jobs around wayward girls, he falls into the trap of a mutant creating rogue agent who assures him that the treatment would cure him of the cancer. And thus starts the story of tortures, chicanery and ultimate revenge. It has a lot of action, a lot of humour, a lot of everything, finally culminating in a set piece long a...

Cast:  Chris Pine, Casey Affleck, Ben Foster, Eric Bana Rated:  7/10 It’s 1952 and it’s freezing. The sea is abnormally volatile and the wind is ripping off trees and cars in a snowbound land. There’s a tanker that’s broken into half and yet all the seafarers are in the hope of being rescued on a cold, dark night of doom. But despite all this and more, the real-life tale of the world’s finest small boat rescue by a coast guard leader is so heart-warming that you feel the need to join this unique journey of hope and daring. The romance, the action, the titillating inevitability, the fear and the amazement are all captured excellently as you go through this edge-of-the-seat experience. There’s also that syrupy 50s romance on the side and to top it all, the hero is an honest-to-the-bone rule follower you rarely get these days. He tells his fiancee that he can get married only after his captain gives him permission because the rules say so when actually that’s just a f...

Cast:  Benjamin Walker, Teresa Palmer, Maggie Grace, Alexandra Daddario, Tom Welling, Tom Wilkinson Rated : 5/10 After a long, long time a gentle, soulful movie around love has comes to the Indian screen from Hollywood. But that does not mean all’s well with it. It has the sparks and the dousers in equal measure which renders this romance in a neither here nor there zone, somewhat aimless and yet somewhat meaningful. Rich girl meets not so rich guy in a sleepy beach town. He’s a vet and she a doctor. He is quiet, lonely and sad boy working in his pop’s clinic in the day and sitting in his garden chair alone in his backyard through the evenings. She is a dog lover who has a thing for dogs and so inevitably meets up with the young vet. Together they weave a togetherness which is more about the lovely locales, the starlit nights, the full moon sea, the boat rides into marooned islands and some barbeques and family time on the side. There’s marriage and kids too but not eve...

Cast : Sunny Deol, Soha Ali Khan, Om Puri, Tisca Chopra, Aanchal Munjal Rated : 5/10 Ghayal .... once again.... because it is not in sync with the times at all. Sunny paaji is all sincere, angry, frustrated and earnest as he was in Ghayal. But he is also much older, much more bloated and looking somewhat bored with the proceedings himself. Which is sad to say because, well, he is a good (old) man of this constantly moving and very unforgiving film industry. In all these years that he has been away from Bollywood, tending to businesses abroad, things have moved, emotions have moved and issues have moved. No longer does a dhai kilo ka haat impress, or even make sense. No longer does the politics plus corporate vs aam aadmi conflict spew fire. Ghayal Once Again suffers from this out of time syndrome and only the Sunny fans (if there are any left after such a long hiatus) would appreciate this rekindling of an iconic movie. In any case, as compared to the original, this one is st...