Review: 7 HOURS TO GO

Audience Held Hostage To What Feels Like 7 Hours

1.5 stars

Mini Review:

An angry young man takes seven hostages and asks the police for the head of a super rich man who has wronged him. The result is loud, chaotic and mostly pointless runaround. You want to empathise, take sides - the cops or the hostage taker - but the story is too convoluted for us to care.

Main Review:

It’s a mockery of the system when an outstation cop walks into the Bombay High Court and holds people hostage because his girlfriend, who is a witness in a case is shot just after the bad guy gets away scot free. He gives the Mumbai cops seven hours to get the said bad guy back in custody or he will shoot every hostage one by one.

Now that sounds like a plot that works fine for an action flick. But then they try to get clever with it. They begin with ‘wow, I’m so clever’ introductions: Varun Badola plays police officer Dhadke: The Quirky Cop; Shiv Pandit plays Arjun Ranawat: The Hostage Taker and the villain Khemka is called ‘The Evil Villain’, and if that is not enough, there is a trickster called Amol Palekar. You want to wash your hands off this gimmicky flick, but you cannot. You are impaled to your seat by sharp, incessant background score that is accompanied by criminal strobe/flashes of blinding lights that are supposedly ‘high-tech’ laser and computer security system ‘sounds’.

Oh there’s a lady cop who changes her decent white shirt in front of all the other male cops just to prove that she’s badass. And if that white shirt was changed because it was not pristine any more, then why does she wear the blue tee shirt the chaiwallah lad was wearing? If you wonder who writes such trash, then be amazed at the reveal: everyone and their uncle is involved in the plot. You don’t care what motivated each one of them to be a part of the plan. You don’t care why the ‘Hostage Taker’ tied the pillars in the corridor with string as if they were lasers. You don’t care if the heroine Police Officer chases the baddie as though she has never run ever. You don’t care if the supposed hard disc full of incriminating information on the baddie is finally downloaded on a pen drive! You don’t care about asking why did they go through an elaborate heist plan when they could have just shot the baddie and vanished...

And you realise you have been held hostage for what feels like 7 hours, and you are so bored by the movie you have decorated the curly head of hair of the person sitting in the seat in front of you with popcorn.