After the critically acclaimed and commercially successful, "Vicky Donor", John Abraham teams up with Shoojit Sircar in "Madras Cafe", where the producer dons the lead role. Vikram (John Abraham) narrates the revelations behind the murder of the Ex Prime Minister of his country.
After experiencing movies like Spy Games, Body Of Lies or even our own Mission 90 Days, I prefer to call this movie as a docu-fiction. The style of frames chosen and the way its narrated gives you such kinda feeling. The strength of the movie is the story idea where the makers come up with a fictitious angle behind the murder of Rajiv Gandhi. It looks really believable to certain extend. But I felt Shoojit failed to keep me really interested with whats happening on screen except the last 30-40 minutes where the things started to fall in place. The biggest issue is the confused narration and screenplay which wasn't innovative by any means. What we see is Vikram flying from Jaffna to Kochi to Madras to Delhi to Madras to Jaffna to Kochi etc etc etc and loads of decoding stuff. I heard reviews terming this movie as a thriller but sadly there wasn't a moment which thrilled me. There is a dialogue in the movie where a character says that "This is the oldest ploy in the book". Similarly, we see Shoojit & his writers (Somath Dey & Shubendu Bhattacharya) just bringing all the possible scenes in such realistic thrillers starting from a "traitor in the group" to "last minute decoding". Also it will take really some time to understand what they are trying to convey and once you understand, you will feel a bit disappointed. Other than some good scenes during last 30-40 minutes, I didn't find anything exceptional in the making
This movie depends on John Abraham's Vikram and that character required an actor more than a model. John Abraham's wooden performance really affected the emotional quotient of the movie. One example is the scene where he see a badly injured woman in a pool of blood. But his reaction makes you feel like the woman just had a small knife cut. His make up along with his performance in the opening scene/climax scene looked absolutely funny more than emotionaly. Nargis Fakhri looked comfortable because she didn't have to deliver any Hindi Lines. But still her performance wasn't exceptional. Siddharth Basu & Ajay Rathnam were the best performers. The actor who played the role of Bala delivered a poor performance. Then we have a host of unfamiliar faces performing various character roles.
The frames looked like the shots from a handy cam. Now whether its meant for realism or not, it wasn't surely impressive. Kamaljeet Negi's will be either shaking the camera left n right n when its still, it will loads of zoom in n zoom out. While the editing by Chandrashekhar Prajapati was a royal mess. From this combined editing/cinematography experience, I felt this was Shaji Kailas's style of Docu Fiction. "Sun Le Re..." was the song which played during the end credits and the background score was quite fine especially during the pivotal point of the movie.
I didn't find this movie neither impressive nor thrilling. Maybe its because of over expectations but still I can't find a strong reason to call it a well executed thriller.
Ratings --> 4/10
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