Badmashiyaan: Unbecoming romcom
Atedious romcom about a material girl playing a con on various men, this film directed by Amit Khanna, has little to recommend it. The storyline is liberally borrowed from the Korean film, ‘Couples’ and the treatment is very ‘Vantage Point’ like but unfortunately it’s not a very coherent or exciting engagement.
The narrative tries to interweave lives of various characters into the broad storyline that involves several couple and a lead one. The connections are all made in the café owned by the main lead character, Dev (Siddhant Gupta) who falls madly in love with Nari (Suzanna Mukherjee) and is even willing to go to great lengths (including buying a house which he can ill afford) to woo her.
When the time comes to ask for her hand, she does the disappearing act. The besotted fool that he is. wastes no time in getting his friend, Pinkesh (Karan Mehra) to find out her whereabouts and in the meantime gets embroiled in a bank robbery where he gets rescued from a molestation charge by a pretty girl Palak (Gunjan Malhotra).
Nari in the meantime, gold digger that she is, has latched herself on to a small-time Don, Jassi(Sharib Hashmi) and tries to vamoose with his suitcase full of greenbacks. Pinkesh, finds this out but enamoured as he too is by Nari, doesn’t let-on to Dev about his ex-girlfriend’s predilections. Dev has to gain closure from Nari in order to explore the promise of a relationship with Palak, but complications abound…
Firstly, the scripting is a little too lazy even if a little too over-ambitious in it’s execution. Following the ‘Vantage Point’ pattern of back and forth narration with a new apparently connected revelation coming forth with every flashback, it’s a royal mess. The connections are not made with any finesse. The adjoining plot-points don’t mesh together well and that puts the entire experience in a sort of disarray that is difficult to make sense of.
The performances are also quite jaunty and unedifying. Sharib Hashmi as the Don tries valiantly to stay afloat but even his display of talent here is wasted. There’s little sense in the adoption of a pattern that doesn’t fit in well with the milieu, plot or enactment thereof. Also singular lack of consistency in the plotting is completely galling. Not a film worthy of your time or money!