But not this van A Razor sharp look at this week’s fare
Minty Tejpal Posted On Saturday, June 19, 2010 at 04:32:59 AM For the many fans of Mani Ratnam’s sublime cinema, myself included, Raavan will be a disappointment. Mani sir takes the universal tale of the Ramayana, familiar to everyone in yearly Ram Leelas, and re tells it in a boring, trivial manner. Sure, Raavan has unexplored natural locations and is stunningly shot, with misty ravines, raging waterfalls and deep gorges filling the screen, but the narrative is poor, the dialogues clunky, the screenplay repetitive, all of which makes the film a tedious experience. Abhishek Bachchan plays Beera , a renegade outlaw somewhere in deeply forested Laal Matti, and is a mix between a Naxalite, Veerapan and Robin Hood. Supported by his two brothers Mangal (Ravi Kishen) and Haria (Ajay Gehi), he leads some brigands through jungles, killing cops, raiding police camps while looking after poor tribal villagers. We are told Beera is a legend. It doesn’t show. A new tough cop, Dev (Vikram) is sent to ‘deal’ with him, except Beera kidnaps his beautiful wife, Ragini (Aishwarya), in a stunning scene where he crashes his large boat into her tiny canoe, shattering it. Vikram starts chasing Beera with forest guard Govinda, who finds hidden trails and jumps across trees, monkey like. Vikram and his cops chase the elusive gang, who stay nearby. Abhishek almost kills Aishwarya except that she jumps off a cliff, while the brigands raid the cops’ camp. Aishwarya tries to escape but is caught, an assistant cop (Nikhil Dwivedi) is captured and tortured and Aishwarya tries escaping again. Damn. All this while, the chemistry between Abhishek and Aishwarya remains strained and confused, like the film. Finally, Govinda finds Aishwarya but gets captured himself. In a truce, Gehi goes to meet Vikram who kills him. Yup, the plot has pointers from the Ramayana, except they don’t add up. Eventually you learn that Abhishek is on a vengeance because Vikram raided his sister’s (Priyamani) wedding. The police caught her and raped her till she committed suicide. The eventual resolution, when Vikram faces up to Beera over a precarious bridge is a bit stretched. And Vikram asking Aishwarya to take a polygraph test to prove her purity is truly corny. Finally, Raavan fails in its principal casting, as Abhishek cannot pull off the menace that his character requires. He tries to goggle his eyes, beat his head like a tabla and mutter gibberish ‘chak chak chak’ in an attempt to signify deranged evil but fails as his city demeanor gives him away. One can almost see him on his I-phone after finishing a shot, saying ‘yo dude, whats up’. Worse, though his face stays muddy, his teeth stay sparkling white: highly unlikely for a brigand outlaw in the forest. Aishwarya stays dirty through the film, screaming her way as she tries to escape, while Vikram is impressive, but with little scope for histrionics. Both Priyamani and Ravi Kishen are good in their brief roles, but it’s Govinda who steals the film in his sharp cameo. AR Rahman’s music is average by his standards and in the end so is Raavan.
