I�m not one for clich�s, really I�m not, but there are moments when one has to resort to them in order to allow others to quickly and effectively grasp what it is you truly mean. This is no more true than in film (though football commentary comes in a close second). Watching hundreds of movies a year sometimes leaves one without fresh thoughts, and it is then that you have to pluck a classic out of the air and abuse it once more. Krrish is the perfect opportunity to dust off one the of the most famous lines in history, the immortal but not-quite-retired � this film is so bad it�s good�.
Now before anyone reading this thinks I have it in for Indian films, or that I have a hard-time following the plots, I urge you to read the reviews I wrote for the excellent but out-of-left-field Black, Water and Family. This however is another animal entirely, appearing to be 4 or 5 different well-known American movies stapled together and sold to the general public as a complete work. Nothing could be further from the truth. Krrish is slapdash filmmaking of the worst kind, something so embarrassing I couldn�t help but MST3K it as we went along, and it is this kind of work that continually sets Bollywood back as a provincial film community full of lazy thieves trading on the gullibility of the general public.
But enough of the harsh criticism, what Krrish also is is unintentionally hilarious, a non-stop cavalcade of poor acting, terrible direction, drugged-up editing and ridiculous 'pic & mix' scripting. The plot is too baffling to explain properly but seems to revolve around a wunderkind, Krishna Mehra (Roshan) who is taken away by his concerned grandmother to live in the middle of nowhere, in the belief that people would exploit his otherworldy gifts otherwise. So there he stays, conversing with birds and children, and slowly going nuts, until Priyanka Chopra�s make-up skydives into his heart. While he falls in love immediately (as is the rule in Bollywood films) she sees a chance to save her job at a TV station in Singapore (though little related to that seems to go on there) and brings him over to, you guessed it, exploit him.
There is far more to the plot than that though, mainly because it veers all over the place, collecting and discarding characters like some drunk bus driver on New Years Eve. Along the way Krishna heals a broken ankle, helps a street performer collect money for his disabled sister (though why he couldn�t also heal her is a good question), saves a dozen people from a circus fire (thereby becoming, if only for a minute, the superhero Krrish), beats up a bunch of thugs who stole a ring from Priya (Chopra) AND, this is where it gets really interesting, is called upon to foil the plans of the evil computer genius, Dr. Siddhant Arya, who has built a computer that can SEE THE FUTURE. Oh, and did I say that the evil genius used his father, a man who disappeared twenty years ago, to help design it? Neither does the film really.
It�s terrible, it�s brilliant, it�s embarrassing, and it�s super-funny. Roshan is an appallingly bad actor, gurning his way through scenes and looking faintly retarded the whole time. Chopra�s make-up, because it�s hard to see her under it, is also dreadful, doing little more than wide-eyed gasping throughout. Not one of the supporting actors, who flit in and out as the plot demands, do anything more than pick up a paycheck, with Shah being the worst culprit. The man had obviously watched too many recent Bond movies and based his performance on them when he should have taken the opposite advice. And what is with his fake, and long, news reports delivered straight to camera? He�s no Nicholas Witchell that�s for sure.
The plot(holes) go into overdrive when it is revealed (in a painfully long flashback) that Krishna�s father got his powers from an alien (yes it goes sci-fi on us for 5 minutes) and that is why his son is also superhuman. No one mentions this again, or is at all surprised by it, and the sub-ET creature nearly made me fall out of my chair with laughter. While very deus ex machina what it doesn�t explain is why Roshan�s powers go from being pretty cool (being able to climb mountains quickly or outrun a horse) to the downright insane (being able to keep up with a helicopter, even while swimming). Some of the fight scenes are so poorly filmed you wonder why they bothered, and again Krishna�s abilities vary according to the needs of the plot. He�s like the Indian Lobo.
All that this movie really shows is that the pronouncements of certain American stars that Bollywood is the future are hopeful at best. The cinematic guilds in most of Europe and South-East Asia produce more quality in a year than Bollywood ever has, and its over-reliance on the same plotline, thieving of ideas from abroad, models that can�t act (almost all the biggest stars in India were once Miss World�s or catwalk models, including Chopra and Aishwarya Rai), and painfully low production values hobble it at every turn. While the Indian people may be satisfied with watching pretty people in the same film over and over again the rest of the world desires it�s palate a little more varied. There is still a very long way to go. |
