On paper, Tamanchey must have seemed like a great idea but it's transition to celluloid, perhaps, needed a stronger, more experienced director, feels Paloma Sharma.
Munna (Nikhila Dwivedi) , a small time strongman from UP, and Babu (Richa Chadha), a criminal mastermind in the drug trade, get caught in two separate incidents.
Due to a punctured tyre in one of the vehicles, the two of them are forced to head towards jail in the same van.
When this van crashes, the two criminals are the lone survivors, that gives new lease of life.
However, they must manage to remain hidden for a certain time period before they are officially announced dead by the authorities.
The two develop feelings along the way and Munna is sure that they've made it until he wakes up alone one day in a city unknown to him.
Navneet Behal's Tamanchey is funny, fast paced and fierce but begins to fizzle out just when you're starting to like it.
Behal introduces both the story and the characters beautifully but in his quest of making Tamanchey the next big thing, he loses sight of what really matters.
On paper, Tamanchey must have seemed like a great idea but it's transition to celluloid, perhaps, needed a stronger, more experienced director.
Chadha plays a 'businesswoman' who sells 'Meri Joanna.'
Quick witted and tough, Babu turns small timer Munna's world upside down with her unconventional ways and temperament.
The lead actors do justice to their parts and display crackling chemistry, despite being given poorly developed characters.
Very little is revealed about their past. If one cannot connect to the characters, it becomes extremely difficult to be able to maintain any interest in their lives.
Tamanchey plummets from being a torrid crime-romance into a hackneyed love triangle and every love triangle needs a jerk. Damandeep Sidhu plays precisely that.
Though quite believably menacing, Sidhu needed that extra little something, a little more quirk in the personality, to become a strong villain.
The makers of the film are so concerned about the 'raw' and 'aggressive' element of Tamanchey that characters often trigger unneeded situations, with no logic behind them other than that they're all hot-headed or as the film would have you believe, 'passionate'.
Running way past the amount of time it ideally should have, Tamanchey does an Isshaqzade when there was absolutely no need of it.
The end, along with a good twenty minutes that precede it, seem entirely forced.
No amount of catchy soundtrack, meticulous set design, or slick editing (by Manish Jaitly) can save the film from the lofty, misplaced ambitions of the people entrusted with guiding it.
Rediff Rating: 
