Mithya

Rating : 3/10
Running Time : 100 Minutes
Release Date : 8th Feb ‘08
Director : Rajat Kapoor ; Writer : Rajat Kapoor and Saurabh Shukla ; Music : Sagar Desai
Starring : Ranvir Shorey, Naseerudin Shah, Neha Dhupia, Vinay Pathak, Saurabh Shukla

I think the rating would probably be 7/10 for the first half and 1/10 for the second…

It starts off as a kind of comic ‘Don’ (or Don on skates, to be more precise) and then…,well I’m not quite sure what happens next really except to say that it crashes and burns. The 20 minute ride back home at 1am in Pune was actually more interesting than the second half (thanks to the amazingly narrow exit at the Inox car park, two idiots in Indica’s who felt the desperate need to race each other and a very lazy autodriver who, from my left lane, felt the sudden, inexplicable yet compelling urge to u-turn)

We shouldn’t take anything away from the first half where Ranvir, Vinay and Brijendra Kala combine spectacularly to provide us a barrelful of laughs. Ranvir is excellent throughout the movie and hopefully this movie can help him appear in more meaningful roles vs the comic cameos so far. Neha Dhupia confidently struts her stuff (pun intended, she has potential, this girl). Naseer is good and the whole thing is brilliantly set up. Which is why the events of the second half are absolutely baffling – I really struggled to stay awake, my wife actually managed a gentle snore and even when we returned home, despite a debate, we couldn’t be sure exactly what had happened. It was like a football match where two sides go hammer and tongs at each other in the first half for a 3-3 halftime scoreline and then replace their strikers and decide back-passing to their respective goalies is the best form of offense for the whole of the second half. Baffling, absolutely baffling, the mysteries of day to day life continue to confound, I tell you…

I’d complained in the previous review (of Sunday) about how the director couldn’t make up his mind whether he wanted to make a comedy or a thriller. Imagine the complication when the director here decides to make a comedy – thriller cum romantic movie ? I’ve known a lot of successful comedy –thrillers (48 Hours, Stakeout, Beverly Hills Cop spring to mind) and even more romantic comedies or rom-coms as they’re affectionately called (When Harry Met Sally, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Pretty Woman all were great to watch) but I struggle to name one which successfully spans all three genres…And I’d been so looking forward to this one ! What a pity….