cinematic_aficionado

A wrestler with potential and big dreams; to make the country he loved proud. Despite his best efforts he did not succeed but he did not give up. One day he aspired to have a son to follow his footsteps.

He did get married but to his (pre-conceived) misfortune he had two daughters, thus leaving his dream of a son who would become a world class wrestler in tatters. Of course, this was to change when one day his daughters got involved in an altercation with a boy and "properly" punished him for misbehaving. This was his epiphany: the fact that he had daughters should not be an impediment to his lifelong dream of having a progeny that would end up being a champion.

That was also the moment, the tragedy for his two daughters begun. Without any consideration for their wants or needs, he begun to groom them for a life of professional wrestling and international glory. Those girls were not asked or considered, they were forced since the only thing that mattered was daddy's dreams. The fact that they were robbed of their childhood was immaterial. Mahavir Singh Phogat just did not care; gold metal was on his mind.

The girls grew up biologically but not emotionally; the fear and need for dad's approval never went away. Even as they progressed in the sports world all their strife was about pleasing dad. It never went away.

This film is a brilliant portrayal of child abuse covered in success. A determined person with no resistance from a submissive spouse went on to take over the lives of his children and formed them in his own resemblance.

Sure, there were successes. The girls became champions, won medals and some will say their father never stopped believing in them when in fact he never ceased to believe in his own sporting ambitions using his children as vehicle. He even buttress it as women's right going so far as to say "no one should say a girl cannot do what a boy can do" or "they would have ended up housewives performing chores". Anything to make himself feel better and justify the emotional robbery he performed on his children.

A brilliant and highly poignant and emotional film, made me want to jump to the screen and rescue Geeta and Babita.

Two friends, utterly fed up with their underachieving lives, have an epiphany where during a costume party they dress as cops and the reactions of strangers who are unaware that they are phonies give them a sense of authority and gravity, not to mention a much needed sense of actually being needed for something.

It is all well and good but it is a lie, a total charade. At least the rational of the duo points out early on whilst the light-hearted other half is not prepared to relinquish the sense of authority his new outfit has given him and is prepared to go all the way in order to convince himself and everyone else around him that he can be a cop.

Little did they know about what being a policeman entails and when they encounter a gang of dangerous criminals they realise they have bitten much more than they could chew.

This is a light hearted comedy through and through. It is agreeable from start to finish without ever reaching any highs. The story trends from the hardly believable to the outright unbelievable which is made up by the originality of the two main characters who were driven by an urgent need for change.

One of man's perennial questions is 'what if we could use 100% of our brain capabilities' and this is the main thrust of this film.

Since it is based on a scientific assumption, this is a science fiction movie that treads on a rather thin line. The truth is we don't know, empirically, how much of our brain we use and neither can we tell what it would be like if we reached 100% so the makers of this movie took a huge creative leap with rather mixed results.

Don't get me wrong on the whole, it is a decent experience, well made, and at times rather intense. Nonetheless its story has holes on several levels.

It doesn't get off on a promising start due to a prolonged incoherent dialogue between a guy and a girl where somehow the girl is forced to make a delivery unaware of the significance of the importance of the content she delivered. Now, you get a gang that invests a lot of money to develop a unique mind enhancing drug, so how come they decided to test it on a random girl rather than in a controlled environment?

From the moment Lucy is caught up, the story flies off from there with several gaps which rather grow that get covered culminating in a very bizarre climax.

Concluding, this is a theme with plenty of potential but goes nowhere near reaching it. The sci-fi aspect, largely conceals the action and thriller elements of this movie and in a detrimental fashion too.