350 Crore Ki Jyaadati, Kyon Saho?!
1 star
Mini Review:
Cool dude saves a baddie in a gareebon ki The Raid: Redemption style fight. Cool dude turns out to be super cop. He's invited to solve strange robberies and chooses a woman in his team and behaves outrageously with her. The rest of the team is too enamoured with him to scream sexual harassment. Turns out robber wants to rob 'black box' type key to billions stolen from crime boss from some foreign shores. After many convoluted, windy events later when you are bored out of your wits at the slow pace of the film you see the end: Saaho sit down on a big chair in a blue leather suit.
Main Review:
From Game Of Thrones to The Matrix to every other cop show on Netflix offers the story of Saaho conceived perhaps by a committee. Or should I say, there isn't a single original thought in this 350 crore 175 minute mistake.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of Prabhas since his Chakram days, and I loved him in Bahubali. But this film is not his fault, especially because he looks uncomfortable in many scenes.
The film begins with a bunch of bad guys sit around like the Yakuza Council from Kill Bill as the head guy announces he's going legit. Before you can say The Godfather he's killed by a truck ramming into his car when he's talking to someone. Dammit! That was Jackie Shroff! How can you kill him so quickly?!
Cut to Prabhas the super cool dude going into a building full of baddies to save someone who looks like a failed GOT baddie about to be hung if he isn't saved by the time five seetis blow on a pressure cooker full of khichadi. Should have taken that as a hint of the fight where he fights baddies like The Raid: Redemption and has a Harry Potter dog.
Turns out he's a super cop sitting in a super cool car asking the GOT baddie for information.
Cut to super cop forming a super team that includes a woman cop - believe it or not - Shraddha Kapoor. All because super cop is enamored by her naak-naksh. Sad to report that her casting is as sad as putting Shahid Kapoor in the role of Mohammed Ali. Her role is so badly written, you want her to die by a stray bullet or something. And you wonder why Prabhas is attracted to her. She's got sex appeal of a leaky tap. To her credit, she doesn't even try.
Then there's Neil Nitin Mukesh who is the thief who has been behind all those robberies. Apparently the clue to his identity is that he wears matching clothes. Facepalm!
In the meanwhile, back in Baddietown, Arun Vijay shows up at the baddie council meeting as Jackie Shroff's son and heir. There is Tinnu Anand and Chunkey Pandey, Mahesh Manjrekar, and others who are being gleeful about Jackie Shroff's death. By this time you have stopped caring about why they're all cackling even though the money is missing. All you remember is a shot of watery soup swirling and how Arun Vijay's pants (all of the costume changes) are two inches too short and that he's not wearing any socks. Odd design choice, you think...
Then you see our hero too wearing pants that seem to have shrunk by two inches... Could they be related? Perhaps it's a clue...
Lots of convoluted things happen. Everyone is after a 'black box' but not before Shraddha Kapoor gets to wear Rang De Tu Mohe Gerua type costumes which have long flowy, floating in air type pointless extensions and the hero and the heroine sing a Punjabi song and pretend to dance on top snowy mountains on neat wooden platforms to stand on and railings to lean on. Thankfully there is a car chase across a bridge.
And yes, the hero is really the villain and the villain the hero. The shock should have killed the heroine, but she too looks as comfortably numb as the audience. But the Villainous Hero sings, 'I'm a bad boy be my bad girl' type song with many girls and Jacqueline Fernandes convulsing as if under the influence of some Baba Bangali black magic.
Oh yes, Mandira Bedi is also there and she's called Kalki. But she really wants to be Trinity from The Matrix but with a saree. There's a scene where Kalki... I mean Mandira walks as she shoots like she were auditioning for Hindi Matrix... She wants to double cross the boss with funny pants but the photos of Jackie Shroff in the vault scare her to death.
Our hero does a Fast & Furious chase through baddie town with a bank vault within a truck and he's on a motorbike. There are Robocops too and they think they've got the hero but they haven't. But Chunkey Pandey captures hero and gets all the GOT Russian extras to beat up the hero with medieval weapons. Hero beats them all up slowly. And we see last of our collective strength leave the theatre when the hero opens one glorious eye and stares into the camera hoping to gain your approval for the sequel.
That's how you spend 350 crores, folks. They forgot of course to pay the CGI guy to cover mistakes, or the screenwriter to come up with a new story and dialog. They probably were too drunk or scared of Bahubali to direct him. Perhaps the burden of shooting every scene three times in three languages made everything trite.
I so wanted to see Prabhas in something other than an outfit made for Bahubali. But we ended up seeing him in dated cargo pants and an ugly blue leather suit. His voice gets the half star this film deserves. And the other half for his beautiful hands.
(watched Saaho at Movietime Suburbia in Mumbai, FDFS )
