Review: PHAMOUS

PHUCK-ALL

1 star

Mini Review:

This movie about guns and baddies is so slow you could

answer all your pending emails and the story would not have

moved an inch. A local politician and a local baddie rule a

small town with guns. The politician lusts after the wife of a

local chap. The machinations to kidnap her are so pathetic

and the posturing with guns is so ridiculous, you want to fast

forward the whole thing and be done with lust and guns

and whatever…

Main Review:

When you think about why someone needed to tell this story,

you come up with no answers. The story is so sketchy,

everything looks so stretched you wish you had a remote

control to fast forward the whole thing.

The movie begins ordinarily enough. The setting is Chambal,

the dreaded dacoit infested region. They say the waters of

the Chambal river turn anyone into a ‘dhaakad’ or ‘a heavy’.

A girl is getting married when dacoits show up to loot the

wedding. But wait! The dacoit is actually kidnapping the bride.

He’s Kadak Singh (played by Kay Kay Menon, wearing a large

handlebar moustache and yellow contact lenses). The bride’s

dad Shambhu, is none other than Jackie Shroff, who uses his

own gun to stop the looting and kills his daughter instead.

The cops show up and arrest Jackie Shroff (who looks the part

of a guy who could handle a gun, is taken away). Since

Shambhu is gone, Kadak Singh and his bad political crony

Ram Vijay Tripathi (played rather hammily by the hitherto infallible

Pankaj Tripathi) take over the area and become petty dictators.

Kadak Singh’s atrocities are witnessed by a young lad called

Radhe, who unwittingly saves Kadak Singh by refusing to identify

him as the killer in a police lineup...Then there’s Radhe’s

heartbreak over a teacher Miss Rosy (Mahie Gill who is predict-

ably clad in barely there blouses) who is raped and killed by the

sleazy Ram Vijay Tripathi, who then goes to jail. Radhe grows up

to be a namby-pamby Jimmy Sheirgill who marries Lalli (Shriya

Saran, who is dressed up too scantily to be village belle) who in

turn is ogled at and is wanted by the sleazy politician... So

Kadak Singh and Ram Vijay Tripathi hatch a convoluted plan

to first give Radhe a job, send him to do accounts in nearby

villages and then to make merry with Lalli. That takes at least

45 minutes to accomplish. You wonder why they don’t just

shoot Radhe and get on with the lust program? Then you

realise you don’t really care.

(this review appears on nowrunning dot com)