NIRDOSH

Nirdosh’s poster tries to get you hooked from its first impression. “Who is the real killer?” it asks, followed by a second tagline proclaiming itself as “India’s 1st Suspect Thriller” (whatever than means).

The question and proclamation are, of course, marketing ploys that wouldn’t hold up when you watch the movie. But you already knew that as soon as you saw the poster, didn’t you?

Nirdosh [Innocent], which takes its title literally like last year’s murder-thriller Ittefaq [Coincidence], is exactly what you’d expect: a linear murder mystery centred around a confession room (or in this case, a jail cell). There are no twists or turns, particularly after all the characters are introduced to the viewers.

Two films currently in cinemas, one from Bollywood and one from Hollywood, are both yawn-inducing

Lokhande (Arbaaz Khan) is the encounter-specialist, no-nonsense cop with a perfect track record who takes pride on not wearing a uniform. He has three days to get the truth out of his latest murder suspect, Shinaya Grover (Manjari Fadnis), a happily married wife and mother working at a news channel. Shinaya has a single cut on her wrist, which ties in with the evidence at the crime scene. Her husband, Gautam (Ashmit Patel) tries his best to take the blame, but fails miserably. It doesn’t take long to realise that everyone is a terrible liar in this movie.

The screenplay by co-director Pradeep Rangwani is flat. Even a layman can guess the entire plot within the first 15 minutes, which is before we are introduced to the sultry seductress (Mahek Chahal) and the bearded bad-guy who deserves to die (Mukul Dev). Even though Nirdosh is a predictable yawn-inducing two-hour movie, I wouldn’t slam it entirely. The fast pace and kinetic camerawork takes some of the pain away. I wouldn’t pay big-bucks to watch it though. Perhaps, I’ll turn the volume up when Nirdosh is playing at a movie channel at 3am someday. But only if I’ve got nothing better to do. 

12 STRONG

When I read the credits of 12 Strong, one name popped out at me: Ted Tally — the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Silence of the Lambs and its prequel Red Dragon. Tally’s limited filmography of nine titles goes back to a time when characters and drama formed the very core of motion pictures. This may precisely be the reason why 12 Strong — a very, very slow-moving war-actioner — didn’t function as well as it could have.

Co-written by Peter Craig (The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, The Town), this adaptation of Doug Stanton’s non-fiction book Horse Soldiers, is heavy on dull conversations and light on action. The plot, about an elite CIA paramilitary team helping General Dostum liberate Mazar-i-Sharif, is miniscule and straightforward.

Chris Hemsworth plays Captain Mitch Nelson, the head of the special ops unit whose inexperience in the field is worrisome for his superiors. Dostum (Navid Neghaband), an experienced military man, also picks up on this. “You don’t have a killer’s eyes” he tells Nelson. The rest of his platoon, which includes Michael Pena and Michael Shannon (the latter, quite good), have that killer look — not that it makes a world of a difference within the context of the narrative.

Chris Hemsworth plays Captain Mitch Nelson, the head of the special-ops unit whose inexperience in the field is worrisome for his superiors. Dostum (Navid Negahban), an experienced military man, also picks up on this. “You don’t have a killer’s eyes,” he tells Nelson. The rest of his platoon, which includes Michael Pena and Michael Shannon (the latter, quite good) have that killer look — not that it makes a world of a difference within the context of the narrative.

Director Nicolai Fuglsig, a former photojournalist and ad-filmmaker, sporadically builds good enough scenes like the one above. However, without engaging plot-points things quickly become sluggish and repetitive. Soon the lack of character-building and the unending views of dusty, rock-littered mountainscapes made me wish cinemas came with the option to fast-forward a movie.

As a Jerry Bruckheimer-produced movie (Top Gun, Pirates of the Caribbean, National Treasure, Armageddon, Bad Boys, Enemy of the State and a gazillion other actioners), you expect the storyline to twist and turn or, at the very least, bombard the senses with low-brow inanity. When it doesn’t, one feels that one is hit with a double-whammy of tedium and triviality. 12 Strong pays tribute to its heroes in the worst way possible (a la American Sniper) by being a second-rate, boringly structured re-imagining of history.

Published in Dawn, ICON, January 28th, 2018