Film: Bombairiya
Cast: Radhika Apte, Akshay Oberoi, Siddhant Kapoor, Amit Sial, Adil Hussain, Ravi Kishan, Shilpa Shukla, Ajinkya Deo
Director: Pia Sukanya
Rating: * *
This is a film constituting cheap ideas and vacuous thrills. Imagine a popular film star Karan Kapoor (Ravi Kishan reprising his usual crass avatar) sipping single malt and playing louse to an overbearing politician (Deputy Home Minister no less) wife, Alka Angre (Shilpa Shukla). His PR Meghna Shergill (Radhika Apte) is the medium through which all the confusion and mayhem spill out. En route to an assignment that involves the film star being present at a Radio station as part of a meet-with-fans award, she gets waylaid by an angadiya driving a pink scooty (Siddhant Kapoor), loses her cell phone in the process, and all hell breaks loose.
There’s a crucial parcel that needs to reach an orphaned eye-witness, a dim-witted politician’s (Adil Hussain) henchmen who overlooks the young child’s presence at the scene of murder, a lover boy app developer cum wannabe detective Abhishek/Pintoo (Akshay Oberoi) who turns out-of-the-blue and pursues the PR person, a set of bumbling cops, a Chacha who knows too much to stay alive, an undercover encounter specialist (Amit Sial) and the police chief (Ajinkya Deo) who has little clue about what’s brewing under his very nose. And there are families trying to match-make, with suitors, lovers and misunderstandings popping out of the wood-work too, here.
The riotous whorl of intersecting characters and meaningless chatter doesn’t lead to anything substantial or meaningful. The flaky attempts to be edgy and pacey fall absolutely flat while the merry-go-around replicates a gamier version of passing the parcel without all the characters knowing that the parcel exists.
The writing is absolutely stupid. There’s much more going on here that defies description and logic. Everyone keeps intercepting the other at odd intervals as though their entire life is concentrated on being central to this movie-setup. And the so-called resolution comes like an after-thought with so many loopholes in it making the filmmaker and writer look rather infantile.
Akshay Oberoi’s attempt to ape Raj Kapoor’s ‘Chaliya,’ Radhika Apte’s unflagging sincerity even in the face of in-distinctive characterisation, Adil Hussain’s flawed attempt to look wily, Amit Sial’s surly attempt to look blandly important and secretive and the rest of the characters presence in the scheme of things, is quite simply absurd and confounding. There’s neither laughs nor thrills to be had here – just a whole lot of muddles and slip-ups that besmirch clarity!