review: Raaz Reboot

Isharon Ko Agar Samjho RAAZ REBOOT Ko Raaz Rehne Do!

1 star

Mini Review:

Emraan Hashmi is Aditya again. Alas there’s no Bipasha Basu rebooted as Shanaya, but another pretty girl (Kriti Khabanda) rebooted as Shaina redoing the Arth 'mangalsutra beads are broken' act, the ghosts that possess bodies are still levitating and contorting bodies, and creaking doors and yanking screaming women under the bed… Reboot means Rehash.

Main Review:

The movie has great locales and the setting is so amazing (it earns its sole star), you wish they had taken advantage of the local legend of vampires (the movie is shot in Romania) to make it a little more fun. But it’s the same ole story of possessed bodies that levitate and contort, get dragged under beds, screams and dreams, creepy crows at windows and exorcists that run out of rooms terrified.

There is a moment of hundred per cent creepiness, though. It’s when the creepy crow turns kamikaze and crashed through the windscreen.

Sorry to tell it, but the rest of the times, it’s a very tedious watch. Shanaya has fought with Rehan the reluctant husband (he does not want to be finance head of a Romanian bank, he does not want to sleep with his beautiful wife) and have now come to Romania where they met and fell in love. Within a month, the pretty wife is possessed after she unpacks a bleeding computer (am not offering a vituperative, the computer really does bleed).

Why is Rehan (Gaurav Arora) so reluctant and sulky? Maybe he needs a haircut (his hair weighs probably more than his entire body weight, and it’s so fluffy, they missed a shampoo/conditioner endorsement!), maybe he needs to wear less tight trousers, or maybe he realises that he missed acting classes that taught expressions other than plain sulky… But they tell us that he has a secret that makes him permanently sulky. And the trouble is Shanaya wants to know it and on top of it, she is plagued by a spirit. How one missed Bipasha’s Shanaya and Ashutosh Rana’s Professor Agni Swaroop here. But all is not lost! We have a blind man who writes with a pen on paper (would have been easier in braille, no?), he even knows when there is no more space left on the page, and reads from an illustrated ancient text he carries around and reads from…

But thankfully the pretty girl is very pretty. So pretty, the spirit wants to drink chai from the same cup with her! And follows her everywhere and lays her naked on the dining table (all the better to feast on, I suppose), It even… You have to stop falling asleep in the movie, the person next to you shakes you awake. You miss Adhyayan Suman here… Even though he lost the baby with his Nandita in the second Raaz, at least he gets her to the hospital. Here sulky Rehan with silky head of hair simply attempts to imitate Hrithik Roshan’s pinched nostril act and fails. His friends (poor Indian couple) get stuck with reading what the blind man has written and generally there so that the spirit can beat someone else other than ridiculous Rehan.

Emran Hashmi must have has a whale of a time in this film. He is Aditya again. This time a Creative Director, photographer who has had a passionate affair with Shanaya (rehashed… I mean ‘Rebooted’ character), and just like Prithvi who drew slashed wrists pictures, this time he dreams vivid dreams…

By the time the music has lulled you into thinking you have heard these tunes before, thankfully spirits have emerged from the possessed girl in a black smoke and crashed into the windows and it is daylight again (the ushers in the theater have opened the ‘exit’ doors for you). It’s a relief from this terribly rehashed story.    

(this review appears on nowrunning dot com)