FILM: TEZZ CAST: Anil kapoor, Ajay Devgan, Boman Irani, Zayed Khan, Kangana Ranaut, Sameera Reddy, Mohanlal DIRECTOR: Priyadarshan BOLLYWOOD SCREENING JOHNSON THOMAS
Priyadarshan, taking a break away from his senseless comedies, ma
kes a comeback of sorts to the thriller genre. His alt145 Tezzalt39is like a woman infancy clothes- all dressed- up but having nowhere to go! The central conceit about an illegal UK immigrant Akash Raina( Ajay Devgan) who gets deported back to his home country, only to return after four years and engineer a bomb threat on a London- Glasgow superfast train, ostensibly to gain some lucre, falls flat because the motivation behind the act is so flaky that the minute it gets revealed the fancily engineered trussed- up scales that Priyadarshan dresses his narrative in, begins to look and sound ludicrous.
Akash Raina is out to get back what was supposedly unjustly taken away from him. He was an illegal immigrant in the UK , who fell in love and later married a legal immigrants daughter( Kangana Ranaut). After an ultimatum from her father, they set- up a company where some of their employees are Indians who have entered UK through clandestine, illegal channels.
The immigration cops get wind and lay siege to the company and Akash is promptly deported. At the airport, on is way back to India, he learns that his wife is pregnant and then loses complete touch with her. The next we know of him is when he returns with a extortion plan with fellow illegals, Adil( Zayed Khan) and Megha( Sameera Reddy), which is supposedly meant to satisfy his own sense of justice( however skewed or ridiculous it may seem). The narrative in fact opens with the sequence informing us of the bomb on the train and the behindthe- scenes activity going on to steer the passengers to safety. The uptight Commander, Counter- terrorism, Arjun Khanna( Anil Kapoor) wants to be the one to crack the case so that fellow Indians may no longer be branded only as terrorists.
Yeah, and we are supposed to believe! The camerawork is spiffy, the shot- taking is quite sharp and the action swings from somewhat believable to the downright outrageous.
Priyadarshan puts out the works- lots of cars , chases, bikes too, a speed boat chase, plenty of running around, uniformed men with earpieces and walkie- talkies indulging in frenetic communications, some train- to- train pyrotechnics and underground shenanigans , bombs that could get detonated by even minor triggers, sharpshooting, counter- terror negotiations are all part of the set- up. There are high- yielding moments in the frenzied chases and then there are those stupid machinations that even a child could see through. Its all so dippy and without smarts that you never feel involved. The blatant unappealing nods to erstwhile Hollywood thrillers( Speed, Die hard, Bullet train) was of course expected.
The script is the weakest link here. The plotting is unintelligent , the characters lack sufficient motivation and the dialogues sound out of place- Especially when the alt145 goras( and there are many of them)alt39speak Hindi. Even the character Shivan Menon, a special cop, essayed by southern stalwart Mohanlal comes off as a mere caricature.
He speaks halting and accentuated English and hindi at best and then suddenly when he has to speak a longer dialogue, the accent disappears and you realise that that part was dubbed. In fact the entire film appears patchy and incongruous.
One wonders how an Indian living in the UK for years togetherenough to get employed in the Police, failed to shed his linguistic inhibitions.
On the one hand so- called tension is being built- up in the detailing of the bomb placement and the attempted rescue and then in between we are given brief inserts/ glimpses of flimsy back story that not only slows down the pace but also makes the entire engagement seem suspect. Even the time- line is all over the place. For most of the runtime we are unclear about how much time is left for the bomb to detonate. The pa
