Friday, July 31, 2015

Review: Drishyam

Drishyam Is Time Naashyam!
Drishyam Is Unintentional Haasyam!

2 stars

Mini Review:

Had they told the story simply without over-explaining everything, the movie would have been brilliant. At 166 minutes, Drishyam is mostly a waste of time. And a silly, simpering heroine doesn't help.

Main Review:

'Red Riding Hood is a girl who is wearing a red riding hood.'
'Is she a girl?'
'Yes, it's a girl, who is wearing a red colored hooded riding jacket'
'Is that so? Correct me if I'm wrong, Red Riding Hood is a girl who is wearing a red riding hood, right?'
'Right.'
'I'm going to tell everyone about Red Riding hood now.'

(cut to)

(dialog repeated as person tells everyone about red riding hood)

You throw popcorn at the screen because they forgot capital letters...

This is the kind of show and tell and tell again and again makes Drishyam 166 minutes long. You wish they'd fast forward those parts. Don't get me wrong, the story is good. It's just that they tell and they tell and they tell again and again, and you are so weary, you want to send in a request that since there isn't any suspense any more, so could you please kill or maim someone to break the monotony?

Now Ajay Devgn and his awesome choice of sandals (just perfect for the role) and he is rather sweet as a cablewallah who watches movies all night. But his muscles do not hide. He looks like he could take on the entire bunch at both police stations without breaking into a sweat. You can imagine a Rajkummar Rao or even Nawazuddin being beaten up by cops, but not Ajay Devgn. He's still Singham. Not paavam enough. But having watched Mohanlal in the same role, you wonder how Mohanlal manages to look less of a man mountain even though he's a big guy. But he's a big guy who rides a bicycle (Ajay has been given a motorbike) and his frame magically shrinks when confronted by cops.

That brings us to Gaitonde. Baddy supreme. He's so awful, you want to make sure you don't attract his attention if he's walking on the same street as you. He's so bad, he could be Pran. What a fabulous actor Kamlesh Sawant is. If there's one reason you need to see the movie, he would be the reason. He's superior to even Tabu. The job is to be single-mindedly nasty, and he earns the star for the movie.

Tabu simply holds he breath and pretends to be stern. She doesn't even weep at the camera. She hides her face in her husband's shoulder like some damsel in distress. How one missed Vijayshanti! Pardon me, but Tabu's uniform is too tight across her bosom. And her back to camera shot when she's torturing men is guffaw inducing.

Speaking of guffaws, Shriya Saran simpers and simpers and is so coy, you want to extricate yourself from the molasses dripping out of every frame she appears in. She's even coy when she's sitting on the floor, stricken, after the tragedy... How I wished for the simplicity of Meena - Mohanlal's wife in the other Drishyam. And their believable home.

You expect an old but modest home (Not Finding Fanny style dilapidated, but a home with a with a little bit of damp here, and plaster falling off there...) but you get a perfect picturebook house with crisp curtains. What the art director does not realise is that the audience is so bored of the slow moving story, we notice that a switch by the door switches on a table lamp! The house is as silly as Shriya's coyness.

Just compare the pictures of the two families and you know why Ajay Devgn and co look like they're tourists when Mohanlal and his family look like they could give you direction to your aunt's house

The young cable lad (seen previously in Balak Palak) is as perfect as casting could get. 

The story gathers momentum in the last 45 minutes. And you like the story. And you wish their editor had a trigger finger for the delete button. He would have put together a far better movie than what you watched for 166 minutes. 

I wish to apologise to my forehead for the number of times it met my palm through those 166 minutes. The how-they-dun-it reveal is stylishly done, and you'd have appreciated it more had they not shown it being done, and told us about it again and again and again.











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