June 8, 2007
'The Train' - A Bogus Ride on Celluloid By Subhash K. Jha
Film: "The Train"; Cast: Emraan
Hashmi, Sayali Bhagat, Geeta Basra and Aseem Merchant; Director:
Raksha Mistry and Hasnain Hyderabadwala; Rating: *
Tagline for this week's thriller - "Some lines should never be
crossed". Sounds familiar. Wasn't that the tagline for the 2005
cheesy downmarket Jennifer Aniston and Clive Owen starrer
"Derailed"?
Co-directors Mistry and Hyderabadwala, to whom goes the dubious
distinction of being the only directorial duo of Bollywood after
Abbas-Mustan, don't just rip off the fast-paced loco-motivated
thriller about the price an adulterous man must pay for biting into
the forbidden fruit.
They turn it into a mushy-mushy rush-rush job where the film editor
seems as much in a hurry as the commuters in the Thai subway that
houses this thriller's non-existent thrills.
Trust me, Geeta Basra playing Aniston's role is quite a forbidden
apple. She pouts, preens and poses as though Glenn Close in "Fatal
Attraction" has suddenly got too close for comfort.
And Emraan Hashmi as Michael Douglas from "Fatal Attraction" is a
fatal aberration. Emraan's titillating transgressions are the stuff
that Mahesh Bhatt's cinema are made of. And yet here lies the
deception - the very idea of placing Emraan at the vortex of a
lustful infidelity is not temptation enough to sit through this
stilted rip-off of a passably puerile thriller.
It's one thing for Shekhar Kapur to sublimate "Man Woman & Child" by
making it into the resplendently emotional "Masoom".
Mistry and Hydrabadwala heat up the cold warmth of the Hollywood
film into a mockery of all definitions of life, love marriage and
lust in cinema.
The Thai setting hardly helps to pump up the anaemic adrenaline. It
only heightens the queasy feeling of watching a bad Hollywood
thriller vandalised by people who don't seem to have one original,
let alone inspiring, bone in their creative body.
In the absence of an inner conviction, the narrative creates scenes
from a broken marriage whose splinters pierce the plot with
agonising self-consciousness.
K. Raj Kumar wields the camera as though Bangkok was an overgrown
shopping mall. The film wears an over-ripened decadent look
suggesting forbidden pleasures.
Yes, Mithoon's tunes are interesting in bits. Why not watch them at
home?
If you really want to know why modern marriages are falling apart,
don't look for answers in this unfaithful adaptation of a foreign
film on unfaithfulness. Watch Anurag Basu's "Metro" instead. But if
you really want to know what's wrong with Hollywood rip-off-ed Hindi
films, go see "The Train".
A more bogus ride on celluloid would be difficult to obtain.
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