Beware of a film that opens with a medical college professor telling his students - “The brain is the most important organ of the human body”
- Old Chinese Proverb
For close to 10 years now, Aamir Khan’s association with a film ensured that audiences could walk into the theatre without reading any reviews, with the assurance that the film would boast of the same high standards of meticulousness and perfectionism that he represents and brings to each of his performances. With Ghajini, a film that is shoddily written and directed and feeble in nearly all departments, that reputation must take a beating. It is hard to imagine why Aamir Khan, who is reputed to be as fastidious about the scripts of the films he signs as he is for the right look for his character, agreed to do a film which does not seem to have a script at all.
The story of Ghajini unfolds in a mix of a linear and two flashback sequences which scarcely enhance its coherence. In a linear manner, the story is so – The muscle bound telecom mogul hero (whom no one has seen for some reason) returns from overseas. By the silliest of plot contrivances hero falls in love with minor-model heroine while pretending to be a struggling model himself. After some songs and some silly comedy heroine too falls in love with hero and agrees to marry him, not knowing he is a mega-tycoon. Hero lies to the heroine that he is going to his village to see his ailing mother when actually he is going to London. While hero is away, heroine exposes a kidney-stealing cum child prostitution racket run by the big-mustached villain - Ghajini. Ghajini implicates himself before the heroine and then kills heroine and injures hero on the head giving him short term memory loss (and side-effects like an infinite pain threshold, superhuman strength and an OCD of exercising). Hero now stumbles around Mumbai with his disorder using his tattoos and Polaroid photos as external memory devices, looking for Ghajini. He kills people with the efficiency of T-1000 from Terminator 2 and looks confused after doing so (for comic effect). Hero finds villain. Hero kills villain. Hero parties with children. End of film. Thrown in the middle are a cop who runs as fast as Osain Bolt and shares the hero’s penchant for flaunting his biceps, a medical student with unclear motivations, an absurd backstory about buying 3 ambassador cars, juvenile jokes involving chaddis among other things, an unfunny SRK impersonator and lots of product placement (Van Heusen, TVS, Hamam etc).
I will not try to nitpick here. I will not question how plausible it is that no one has ever seen the head of the biggest telecom company in India. Or why he always travels in a cavalcade of four black Mercedes-Benz cars like a Mafioso. Or why there is no serious police investigation when such a high profile man is attacked so brutally. Or how does the head of a pharmaceutical company who diversifies his revenue stream by dabbling in kidney rackets and child prostitution and surrounds himself with the most obvious scum of the earth, get invited as a chief guest to the cultural function of a medical college. These plot-holes are minor flaws before Ghajini’s main problems – incoherent story, mediocre performances and poor direction.
Director A R Murugadoss does not understand Hindi. That is evident from the poorly written dialogues. It also seems that he does not understand subtlety, or understatement. The film is riddled with stale clichés and sickening melodrama that make one cringe. The heroine’s benevolence is established by scenes where she helps a group of handicapped kids. To reinforce that this was not a one-off incident there is another scene where she helps a blind man to the bus stop and narrates everything that is happening around which the poor blind man can’t see (how very humane!). Her profound love for the hero is proved by the fact that she sells her most hard-earned possession for the treatment of the hero’s sick mother (who doesn’t even exist because the hero is lying to hide the fact that he is going to London in his private jet).
Whenever there is the slightest hint of action in the film, A R Murugadoss turns on the hyperactivity throttle. The camera goes into an epileptic seizure with 2 second rapid-fire cuts, idiotic fast-forward motion, and all kinds of pretentious camera tricks with loud sound effects. Unfortunately none of them are able to conceal that the action is rather lame and the fights poorly choreographed. For a film with such a large amount of violence there is not a single fight sequence that gets your adrenaline up.
The background score is a perpetual attack on the ears. There is not a quiet moment to be found in the film. The score abounds with more cries and wails than an Enigma album and weird metallic sounds. The aim seems to be to deafen the audience and stun them into a state of partial unconsciousness, so that they do not realize what garbage they are being subjected to.
A R Rahman has provided a cut-price, B-class variant of his music. The songs, except the beautifully shot Guzaarish are hardly memorable. None of the songs register with their tunes and the less said about the lyrics the better. It is hard to believe that this is the same composer who gave us Rang De Basanti.
The performances range from awful to mediocre. Asin overdoes the cheerful yet naïve yet mischievous yet virtuous girl part. Her act composes of shrugging her shoulders, moving her hands around excessively and putting on a myriad of expressions that seem to come straight out of a high-school play. So overdone is her performance that Aamir Khan appears to be embarrassed sharing frames with her. Her cringe-inducing acting completely cuts out the slightest iota of empathy or sympathy one might feel for her character.
Aamir Khan’s performance can be divided into two halves – before injury and after injury. The pre-injury Aamir Khan is strangely subdued, and seems ill at ease with Asin. There is about as much chemistry in the Aamir-Asin pairing as one would find in a history textbook. In the second half he displays only two emotions – rage and confusion. Vengeful and furious, he explodes with the intensity of a raging volcano when reminded of the sad demise of his beloved; however his love story is so badly sketched out that one wonders what he is getting so worked up about. In the scenes when he gets confused after suffering a memory loss, not only does one not feel any sympathy for his condition but it is hard to suppress laughter at the brainless absurdity of it all.
Jiah Khan has a poorly written character whose motivations are difficult to fathom and she does not add anything to our understanding of them with her rather limited acting skills. Pradeep Rawat, who played Sultan in Sarfarosh, plays the pantomime villain with gusto and adopts a faux Haryana/Western UP accent to further add to the comicality.
Ghajini suffers from an asinine script with innumerable plot contrivances and poorly written characters, who act erratically according to the whims of the director and the direction he wants to force the film into. It suffers from a cacophonic score, noisy songs and camera work which makes you wonder whether the cinematographer was having seizures. The only innovative part of the script - the 15 minute memory, has been conveniently lifted from Christopher Nolan’s Memento and then misused in the worst possible manner. The only commendable thing about Ghajini is the work Aamir Khan has put in to sculpt his body but considering the overall poor standard of everything else in the film one wonders if so much pain would have been better utilized for a better film.
Ghajini is a mediocre film and seems a vanity project for Aamir khan, to prove that he too can do ‘mainstream’ films with as much élan as anyone else. If mainstream means deposit-your-brains-at-the-baggage-counter cinema, he has proven his point emphatically. Now let’s hope, normal service will resume.
- Old Chinese Proverb
For close to 10 years now, Aamir Khan’s association with a film ensured that audiences could walk into the theatre without reading any reviews, with the assurance that the film would boast of the same high standards of meticulousness and perfectionism that he represents and brings to each of his performances. With Ghajini, a film that is shoddily written and directed and feeble in nearly all departments, that reputation must take a beating. It is hard to imagine why Aamir Khan, who is reputed to be as fastidious about the scripts of the films he signs as he is for the right look for his character, agreed to do a film which does not seem to have a script at all.
The story of Ghajini unfolds in a mix of a linear and two flashback sequences which scarcely enhance its coherence. In a linear manner, the story is so – The muscle bound telecom mogul hero (whom no one has seen for some reason) returns from overseas. By the silliest of plot contrivances hero falls in love with minor-model heroine while pretending to be a struggling model himself. After some songs and some silly comedy heroine too falls in love with hero and agrees to marry him, not knowing he is a mega-tycoon. Hero lies to the heroine that he is going to his village to see his ailing mother when actually he is going to London. While hero is away, heroine exposes a kidney-stealing cum child prostitution racket run by the big-mustached villain - Ghajini. Ghajini implicates himself before the heroine and then kills heroine and injures hero on the head giving him short term memory loss (and side-effects like an infinite pain threshold, superhuman strength and an OCD of exercising). Hero now stumbles around Mumbai with his disorder using his tattoos and Polaroid photos as external memory devices, looking for Ghajini. He kills people with the efficiency of T-1000 from Terminator 2 and looks confused after doing so (for comic effect). Hero finds villain. Hero kills villain. Hero parties with children. End of film. Thrown in the middle are a cop who runs as fast as Osain Bolt and shares the hero’s penchant for flaunting his biceps, a medical student with unclear motivations, an absurd backstory about buying 3 ambassador cars, juvenile jokes involving chaddis among other things, an unfunny SRK impersonator and lots of product placement (Van Heusen, TVS, Hamam etc).
I will not try to nitpick here. I will not question how plausible it is that no one has ever seen the head of the biggest telecom company in India. Or why he always travels in a cavalcade of four black Mercedes-Benz cars like a Mafioso. Or why there is no serious police investigation when such a high profile man is attacked so brutally. Or how does the head of a pharmaceutical company who diversifies his revenue stream by dabbling in kidney rackets and child prostitution and surrounds himself with the most obvious scum of the earth, get invited as a chief guest to the cultural function of a medical college. These plot-holes are minor flaws before Ghajini’s main problems – incoherent story, mediocre performances and poor direction.
Director A R Murugadoss does not understand Hindi. That is evident from the poorly written dialogues. It also seems that he does not understand subtlety, or understatement. The film is riddled with stale clichés and sickening melodrama that make one cringe. The heroine’s benevolence is established by scenes where she helps a group of handicapped kids. To reinforce that this was not a one-off incident there is another scene where she helps a blind man to the bus stop and narrates everything that is happening around which the poor blind man can’t see (how very humane!). Her profound love for the hero is proved by the fact that she sells her most hard-earned possession for the treatment of the hero’s sick mother (who doesn’t even exist because the hero is lying to hide the fact that he is going to London in his private jet).
Whenever there is the slightest hint of action in the film, A R Murugadoss turns on the hyperactivity throttle. The camera goes into an epileptic seizure with 2 second rapid-fire cuts, idiotic fast-forward motion, and all kinds of pretentious camera tricks with loud sound effects. Unfortunately none of them are able to conceal that the action is rather lame and the fights poorly choreographed. For a film with such a large amount of violence there is not a single fight sequence that gets your adrenaline up.
The background score is a perpetual attack on the ears. There is not a quiet moment to be found in the film. The score abounds with more cries and wails than an Enigma album and weird metallic sounds. The aim seems to be to deafen the audience and stun them into a state of partial unconsciousness, so that they do not realize what garbage they are being subjected to.
A R Rahman has provided a cut-price, B-class variant of his music. The songs, except the beautifully shot Guzaarish are hardly memorable. None of the songs register with their tunes and the less said about the lyrics the better. It is hard to believe that this is the same composer who gave us Rang De Basanti.
The performances range from awful to mediocre. Asin overdoes the cheerful yet naïve yet mischievous yet virtuous girl part. Her act composes of shrugging her shoulders, moving her hands around excessively and putting on a myriad of expressions that seem to come straight out of a high-school play. So overdone is her performance that Aamir Khan appears to be embarrassed sharing frames with her. Her cringe-inducing acting completely cuts out the slightest iota of empathy or sympathy one might feel for her character.
Aamir Khan’s performance can be divided into two halves – before injury and after injury. The pre-injury Aamir Khan is strangely subdued, and seems ill at ease with Asin. There is about as much chemistry in the Aamir-Asin pairing as one would find in a history textbook. In the second half he displays only two emotions – rage and confusion. Vengeful and furious, he explodes with the intensity of a raging volcano when reminded of the sad demise of his beloved; however his love story is so badly sketched out that one wonders what he is getting so worked up about. In the scenes when he gets confused after suffering a memory loss, not only does one not feel any sympathy for his condition but it is hard to suppress laughter at the brainless absurdity of it all.
Jiah Khan has a poorly written character whose motivations are difficult to fathom and she does not add anything to our understanding of them with her rather limited acting skills. Pradeep Rawat, who played Sultan in Sarfarosh, plays the pantomime villain with gusto and adopts a faux Haryana/Western UP accent to further add to the comicality.
Ghajini suffers from an asinine script with innumerable plot contrivances and poorly written characters, who act erratically according to the whims of the director and the direction he wants to force the film into. It suffers from a cacophonic score, noisy songs and camera work which makes you wonder whether the cinematographer was having seizures. The only innovative part of the script - the 15 minute memory, has been conveniently lifted from Christopher Nolan’s Memento and then misused in the worst possible manner. The only commendable thing about Ghajini is the work Aamir Khan has put in to sculpt his body but considering the overall poor standard of everything else in the film one wonders if so much pain would have been better utilized for a better film.
Ghajini is a mediocre film and seems a vanity project for Aamir khan, to prove that he too can do ‘mainstream’ films with as much élan as anyone else. If mainstream means deposit-your-brains-at-the-baggage-counter cinema, he has proven his point emphatically. Now let’s hope, normal service will resume.
