Cast: Himesh Reshammiyan, Farah Karimaee, Monica Dogra, Shekhar Kapur, Naseeruddin Shah, Kabir Bedi, Shernaz Patel
Director: Shawn Arahna
Rating: * * ½
Runtime: 108 mins
After the last few downers in his acting career graph, Himesh Reshammiyan has risen back to a position of almost success because ‘Teraa Surroor’ economized smartly and is already being read as a winning proposition. The music is a winner and has already raked in big bucks for the producers and the film produced on a modest budget of around Rs 6.5 crores with P & M amounting to around Rs 4.5 crore, has managed to start on a winning note given that it’s satellite and associated rights sales have already fetched it more than it’s production value. While it’s Box-Office potential is up in the air, it’s aesthetics is quite questionable.
Designed as a brand extension of Himesh’s ‘Aap Kaa Surroor’ this film, directed by Shawn Aranha is quite stylish but given it’s flaky glamour and poor depth there’s really not much to hold on to for the audience.
Raghu (Himesh) and Tara (Farah Karimaee) are totally in love, living together in a home which also has her mother (Shernaz Patel) as inmate. In the voiceover by Himesh we learn that he is a Mafioso fronting as a successful businessman and his true colors are not yet known to his fiancée. Then Raghu drops a bombshell. On one of his trips abroad, he had a one night stand with a call-girl and this revelation puts a punctuation mark on their relationship. A hurt Tara decides to take up an offer to perform her music in Dublin, Ireland . But once there she is arrested on charges of possession of illegal drugs. Incarcerated in a deeply religious country that brooks no interference with it’s laws, Tara’s only hope is Raghu and his deep seated contacts with the establishment which gets exposed as the escape plan plays out. Raghu trysts with a diplomat Rajveer kaul (Shekhar Kapur), Jail break artist Santino (Naseeruddin Shah) and Top Cop A A Khan (Kabir Bedi) in order to bring back his lady love back home safe and sound.
The film is dialogue driven rather than action driven. Most of the revelations come from verbal exposure while the rest of the film is seeped in reverberating melody backing up visuals of Irelands famed pastoral countryside while Dublin’s magnificence also gets the glossy treatment. The exposition is jumpy at best. Development is truncated in favor of dialogue and background narration and makes the experience distinctively half-baked and unedifying. Convenient edits allow for short-end story-telling , the narrative favoring the cursory rather than in-depth mechanics of what transpires. Himesh’s attempt to do a Salman is definitely not eye-pleasing and his new found gaunt look does little to endear him to the discerning public. His performance too is little more than a series of camera friendly postures that showcase the background more than his facial expressions. Farah, his co-star looks like a cross between Tara Sharma and Nargis and has little to do other than look weepy and scared. As for the stalwarts – they are wasted in roles that do little justice to their talents. The non-linear edits allow for some complexity but it’s not a definitive one. Shawn Aranha shows off his style quotient but the intelligence and organic creativity is missing. And that calls for a less than satisfying experience!
