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Bang Bang is a B-grade film made on an A-list budget, says Raja Sen.
Action films aren't what they used to be. Gone are the days when a girl would heat a knife on a candle and dig out a bullet while Amitabh Bachchan threw out a trademark grimace.
Nowadays all the girl needs to do is shine a torch while the guy puts on a bandaid.
Expecting these insipid heroes and heroines then to, well, bang-bang seems like too much of an ask, especially from the man who made Ta Ra Rum Pum.
All we end up with is a film full of bad foreplay which cuts to a song just when the characters should go bang.
They aren't even good looking songs, alas. Every song sequence in Bang Bang, as well as the many uninventive but expensive action set pieces, looks like a television commercial for something: deodorant, talcum powder, lavender scented bath soap... This aside from the fact that the film is positively mired in grotesque product placements for pizza and fizzy drinks. This, of course, is what happens when a film happens to star two celebrities who are completely packaged products in themselves.
Unfortunately for director Siddharth Anand, however, his actors have zero chemistry.
On paper, I admit it's a good idea, to try and give us the Dhoom 3 experience we never had -- by bringing back Hrithik Roshan, heists and a hot girl -- and to improve it by removing Uday Chopra from the equation.
Somewhere in the middle of this restructuring, somebody had the bright idea to call this an official remake of Knight And Day, a Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz romp that had a ridiculous plot but worked because of how gamely the two superstars dealt with the material.
Roshan takes the material lightly and goes through the motions charismatically enough, but the formerly svelte Katrina Kaif -- trying too hard to recapture Diaz's sprightly goofiness -- comes across as insufferable. Perhaps she's been drinking too many of those artificially-sweetened mango-flavored drinks she flogs.
Bang Bang is all about Roshan stealing the Kohinoor -- which, given the film's advertorial bent, I'm surprised wasn't a product placement for basmati rice. The world is thus after him, but he falls for a naive girl dreamily hunting for a "kitna susheel" boy, possibly the only girl in the world who takes one look at the legendary diamond and asks what it is. Brilliant. Besides the consistently cringeworthy dialogue, all Bang Bang holds are stunts.
Oh, if only they were good stunts.
Alas, every over-choreographed look-at-me sequence looks like something we've seen a dozen times over, never thrilling and fundamentally unexciting -- if for the simple reason that Roshan's unstoppable character, much like the director, never does anything fresh or clever. He gets into big-budget fixes, sure, with cars and buses and seaplanes, but unlike in the original, where Cruise would actually do something ingenuous to get out of a jam, here conveniently timed coincidences do the job for him. As a result, the stakes never seem significant.
This is a stupid, stupid film trying to be slick, a B-grade film made on an A-list budget.
The one saving grace is to see Deepti Naval and Kawaljeet, two fine, underused actors, playing an old married couple. Except they live in a house named House. Everything else is like bad guy Danny Dengzongpa likes his pizza: mass-manufactured, with a cardboard crust and extra, extra cheese.
Rediff Rating: 