Waste of a good idea as this thriller resorts to preachy theatrics

ICHEHRE

t takes a lot to waste such a gripping premise with poor writing. But director Rumi Jafry’s Chehre does just that. The film starts on a promising note, but it soon starts to go downhill. Chehre is so bizarre after a point that even seasoned actors like Amitabh Bachchan and Annu Kapoor aren’t able to lift the script.

An ad agency chief, Sameer Mehra (Emraan Hashmi) gets stranded in a hailstorm, and four retired court officials invite him to spend the night in their haunted house-like bungalow at an isolated hill station. Little does Sameer know that these oldies enact mock trials with strangers as a pastime, and they’ve found their latest guinea pig.

Amitabh Bachchan is the eccentric public prosecutor Lateef Zaidi, Annu Kapoor the funnily serious defence lawyer Paramjeet Singh Bhuller, Dhritiman Chatterjee as the straight-faced Justice Jagdish Acharya, and Raghubir Yadav plays the ever-excited prosecutor

Hariya Jatav. In this court of law, there is no ‘insaaf’ but ‘faisla’. And that’s the build-up for about two hours and 20 minutes when Sameer is tried for murdering his boss.

This is a thriller that fails to thrill. On many occasions, the story written by Ranjit Kapoor comes across as unconventional, but sadly, just when things are looking exciting, it gets so stretched that it ends up losing its momentum. Some more thought into editing could have made it a crisper watch.

The dialogues, co-written by Rumi and Ranjit, are so heavyhanded that they tend to get burdened by their own weight. Here, I want to mention the approximately seven-minute long monologue that Amitabh Bachchan delivers. From the Nirbhaya rape case and acid attack victims to the Uri surgical strikes and Indo-pak tensions, he touches on everything under the sun in one breath. Without getting to the actual point. Watching Kartik Aaryan’s monologue from Pyaar Ka Punchnama would be a better alternative to this preachiness.

Amitabh and Emraan’s faceoff sequences are exciting. Rhea Chakraborty (Anna) as the mysterious house help and painter, is wasted playing a halfbaked character that doesn’t let her do much. So is Siddhanth Kapoor (Joe), who can’t speak. Krystle D’souza (Natasha Oswal), for her first big screen outing, is quite impressive. There’s Samir Soni, too, as Emraan’s boss and Krystle’s husband, but his overacting can just be ignored.

Chehre can’t be called a thrilling courtroom drama. So let’s just say that Rumi Jafry has attempted something out of his comfort zone, but his film is merely watchable.