Talaash: The Hunt Begins...

An action-packed movie - I give the film two stars for Akshay Kumar's knack for playing roles of this sort. This film is dreadful, boring and definitely not worth your time, but Akshay always stands out in the action scenes and tries to be as sincere as the script allows him (it of course does not, but anyway). Other than that - there's just nothing good in this film. A story which had been told a zillion times in the past. His sister is kidnapped, subsequently his mother loses her mind, he wants to find his sister to recover his mother's sanity (huh!). It also has a Kareena Kapoor, who gets forgotten before the nightmarish hunt ends, it has a Pooja Batra (there's no reason to say anything about her is there?), and it has a Raakhee, a great actress who gets typecast as the mother whose tragedy makes her crazy. The scenes are formed with one old cliché after the other. Skip this one - it's a good advice.

This movie is a stinker from the start. The story is bad, the action scenes are bad and most of the acting is bad. The hero is a super human character that marshals his strength when thinking about his poor abducted sister. The women fall in love with him in microseconds, willing to give up everything for this guy. He is good looking but that is way to unbelievable - even daughters betray their fathers after a day with this guy. He jumps through windows of speeding trucks, jumps off of buildings in single bound, dodges bullets, well you get the picture. There are three decent songs in the movie but the set-up and lead-ins are all too unbelievable. Leave this one where you find it and get anything else.

The choreography was somewhere between bizarre and atrocious. Okay, I didn't go into this expecting Hamlet or Pulp Fiction, but... At least with Bollywood you usually get some catchy songs and interesting dance numbers. Most of the music is blah-synth, a few of the songs are decent though I can't be bothered to point them out - yawn - but the choreography was on par with the rest of the bad acting, horrible editing, dopey dialogue, etc.

One star was earned just because Capetown was in the movie. Nice to see Bollywood go overseas on location.

Next!