Kidnap

I guess the basic plot has been given away in the trailers itself - Minisha Lamba is Sanjay Dutt's daughter who has been kidnapped by Imran Khan to take some kind of revenge. So the things to look out were - what made Imran Khan cry revenge and what are the ransom demands ?

The movie titles open with a small graphic novel where we see what happens to Imran when he was a boy - which I think was a very clever way of showing everything without any actual melodrama. But before you can get to the vengeance drama, something else threatens to take over the movie completely! And What A Show !!!

Throughout the movie, Minisha Lamba and Vidya Malvade (the Chak De hockey captain) are competing furiously for the most-cleavage-show-award. Situations etc. be damned !! Minisha Lamba cant help showing even when she is being held by a kidnapper and mom Vidya Malvade does it throughout the movie (even though she is grieving for her daughter – or when she is goes to a jail on some pretext at night !!) And Minisha Lamba wins hands down !! Or ... ahem, deep down :) !!

Though all this provides quite a few laughs – like when Imran Khan cant help his eyes wandering over Minisha when she is having a bath.

Returning to the main drama – both the leading men Imran Khan and Sanjay Dutt do well. Minisha Lamba does her part pretty well too - she is a 'revelation' :D. Vidya Malvade is a failure – and singularly irritating too – but hers is an insignificant character. And the much-hyped chase scene between Imran Khan and Sanjay Dutt is executed pretty well (for those who didn’t catch it, the location was the under-construction Rustomjee apartments near the Goregaon flyover signal).

But even with good performances and good technicals, the film doesn’t work. Here’s why – for this genre of movies, the important thing is to either keep the audience curious/guessing about how or why. The film progresses very well till the intermission – where the audience doesn’t know what is driving Imran Khan or what exactly is his revenge. But post interval, Imran’s background is given away – which robs the movie of its suspense. The only reason left to watch the movie now is to see what exactly is his revenge. And here the script falters - the revenge is hardly something unique or cool.

The ending is just stretched too much – the audience were in the mood “just finish it !!”. In my opinion, it would have been a better movie if he had made Imran Khan a little more … badder and crazier – and made him do something crazy in the end instead of the goody-goody ending.

All in all, I would say, even with the cleavage show (no doubt the best in a hindi movie for a long time, Dhoom 2 included) it is an opportunity wasted. It had a good premise, but ultimately wasted.