A forgettable Saturday morning…

When I came out of the multiplex I wished I had a variant of short term memory loss which would make me forget the last three hours. Those three hours, three excruciating hours, would rank as the worst three hours I’ve ever spent in a cinema hall. This was pure torture, and to add insult to injury, I paid to go through it! Damn! Couldn’t have been a worse Saturday afternoon. Well, in case you haven’t got the drift, I’m talking about the latest release Ghajini, which I along with eight other friends watched today afternoon. I’m now wondering what made me – us – watch this movie in the first place! Was it because it was an Aamir Khan movie? Well, none of us is a diehard Aamir fan. I guess it was just curiosity which made us go for it. We wanted to see exactly how inspired it was by Memento. But curiosity killed the cat, and we managed to escape by hair’s breadth. But only just.

I have good news and bad news about this movie – or rather the traumatic experience we just had – and I’ll begin with the good news. Because it’d only take a line. The rest of the post can be about the bad. Aamir has done a decent job as Sanjay Singhania. Well, he’s done as well as much as the script – or what passes for it – would’ve allowed him. He portrays the angst and the vengeance nicely. But that’s about it. Asin, the female lead in the Tamil original looks nice, but she has nothing other to do than look nice, and be chirpy. Now, that’s where the good part ends. The other female lead, Jiah Khan’s character Sunita is a medical student who comes across Sanjay Singhania’s medical case file. Now the shot in which Sunita is introduced is a medical college laboratory scene, where some professor is pontificating on the importance of the human brain. “The human brain is the most important organ of the human body!” Aah, that was enlightening. And we have the students – of whom Sunita is one – huddled around him listening with rapt attention. Sunita is wearing make up and a garish pink lipstick. Gosh!! If that is how doctors attend medical college laboratory… Sunita’s character is shown to be so dumb that I guess if there is a Hollywood remake of Ghajini her character would definitely be a blond! I can go on about such ‘minor’ things the whole post. But I’m not giving to ranting about things in general, so I’ll skip the part.

The plot – a person having anterograde amnesia seeking revenge – has so much promise. The original Christopher Nolan movie Memento was an excellent piece of work dealing with this central theme. But what Murugadoss has done is just pick up the central theme and weave a traditional Tollywood Masala script around it and presented it to us. There is way too much blood and gore, right from the first reel to the last. Now I’m not amongst the weak hearted to complain about this, but the problem is that it’s senseless blood and gore. You can understand about it in an out-and-out action movie. Hello, this is about one person’s vendetta where he’s battling himself as much as the persons he’s seeking for his lady-love’s murder. And so you have to sit through much head-smashing, backstabbing (the literal kind) and people being hurled around. It would have done the director some good – and heck, the audience as well! – to put some thought into portrayal of the characters instead of so much needless violence. For instance, there’s a cop who finds out about Singhania’s true story. But he’s just a filler, with no significance to the plot whatsoever. He might as well have not been there! And then there’s Sunita. The dumbest, stupidest character I’ve seen on celluloid in a long long while. Considering the standard far coming out of mainstream Bollywood, this is a BIG compliment! She becomes interested in Singhania’s case, then finds out about him, then manipulates him, then goes and tells about him to the bad guy and finally turns around and decides to help him. You and me – and anyone with an IQ higher than 10, I guess – can make out by the goons standing behind the supposed business tycoon that he’s a bad guy in the whole story. But our Sunita – the final year Medical student – just summarily walks up to his door and tells him all about Sanjay Singhania. Why? Oh well, she just wants to help. God help us if all med graduates have a brain like Sunita’s.

The climax is just too contrived to believe it. Heck, it is laughable! And we were in splits watching the last half hour of the movie. Even going by Bollywood’s standards, the hero single-handedly running over a dozen or more of the baddies is a bit too much to digest. We’d expected more from an Aamir Khan movie, at the least. The final scene actually leaves you chuckling, looking at the heroics of our injured hero. And to think that Bollywood had graduated pass such clichés.

Verdict: Avoid at all costs! And if you do happen to watch the movie, I sincerely hope the trauma of watching it induces a temporary short-term memory loss that makes you forget the last three hours.