Chennai Express (Passenger)

It's seventy nine minutes past midnight & after rushing through a 10 PM show here i am sitting in a state of quasi dejection (now don't ask me to elaborate on it for i won't ever be able to help you with this spur of the moment coinage) contemplating what to pen!

Alright it's coming out of THE Rohit Shetty womb who by now has itched his name in the annals of Indian cinema for his ability to methodically produce babies born with a fixed deposit of thousand million. Will this one be able to stand up to its illustrous siblings? Well well well...it JUST might be able to achieve the same & the reasons for being so optimistic ain't akin to illustrating the taste of Potassium Cyanide.

The event of an RS' creation having an iota of a story would invite higher bids than expecting a certain N. Srinivasan to give up his lust for power. So, you don't have any expectation before hand & whatever droplets of pleasant surprises come along the journey you don't mind soaking yourself in with a (forced, more often than not) smile on your face.

RS is a person who religiously believes in keeping one's avowed tenets intact. He has been able to mostly achieve this unsustainable feat by having his core team glued in to his assembly line until now with his main protagonist being Ajay Devgn who would be ably catalyzed by a more than a handful support cast ecosystem. But then two events had to coincide with each other to sow seeds of this work of absolute, mindless fiction. AD sure had a reasonable fallout of sorts with RS and SRK had a popcorn burst in his head inducing him to fill in the void.

I have never been one of the biggest fans of a hamming & stammering SRK but at the same time can't help appreciate his attitude towards his family & life in genral. This guy for sure knows his crowd pulling potential story/critics be damned. But then didn't you feel sorry when Sachin would get repeatedly out in an almost identical "day light margin between bat n pad" fashion. The entire nation cries in unison while silently asking in closed quarters whether the time has come! I fear the same notion now applies to SRK as well who simply seems like is hell bent on proving a point about his star power. But does he manage to succeed?

Not surprisingly the movie has all the staple ingredients of a typical Rohit Shetty recipe & fluoroscent coloured vehicles zipping past like an injured cobra with cylinders / cars flying & inflammed all around is a sight you couldn't have missed in any of his earlier projects even if you entered after the intermission. But to make a Hindi movie with more than reasonable Tamil dialogues speaks volumes about the filmmaker's self confidence.

Deepika as the daughter of a hinterland South Indian don keeps trying to improvise her dialogues but doesn't quite get it. The villain appears to be a good prospect for future roles. But the real winner is OST (Originail Sound Track). Wish there was more of these hummable songs which are the only worthwhile area of note in the movie generally.

One true fan doesn't really get too excited while watching their hero of two & half decades turning into a victim of his own. We are not coded to digest Sachin's failures. Similarly, we can't afford to see fall of the mighty franchise "SRK". We have adored them so much that anything suggesting their downhill trajectory finds a boot. Let both of these professionals fight their own demons to emerge victorious for one last hurrah. Hip hip hurray!

Unsolicitedly yours
(C) Rits original