REVIEW: Murder 2 (2)

CHOP AND CRINGE

The Bhatts had always found a way of bypassing the star system and the by-lanes of Bollywood by making strong on films with plagiarised content with good music and their own roster of actors. Of late they have taken advantage of a more liberal censor board and easy-going  audiences to churn out sex-and-sin thriller, mostly with Emraan Hashmi and an interchangeable ‘hot bod’.

Hashmi has played the cynical, amoral, character so many times, he could write a book on it. But it is still a bit much when Arjun, a commitment-phobic, ex-cop turned drug peddler and his skin model inamorata Priya (Jacqueline Fernandez) exchange hard luck back stories to explain why are the way they are—her mother went mad after her love was spurned by an angrez, his whole family committed suicide.

In Mohit Suri’s Murder 2 (lifted generously from The Chaser) the psycho villain Dheeraj (Prashant Narayan) has an equally bizarre tale—tortured his wife, got himself castrated, and goes about killing and dismembering girls. It’s not a spoiler, the serial killer is revealed quite early on in the film, because the story is supposed to be about the apathetic Arjun’s redemption. He is hired by a pimp to find out where his girls are disappearing to, and Arjun runs into a morbid serial killing scenario.

It’s quite a traditional cop-and-creep thriller, that moves along at a decent pace, but for the viewer there is no great excitement in watching a mad pervert torturing women, unless they are titillated too—like Dheeraj—by their screams, chopped body parts and blood. There are too many yuck-making, eye-averting scenes of gruesome violence; makes you wonder why you should spend good money on a film that is not entertaining and makes you come out of the cinema wanting to upchuck your last meal. The sex is used like an ‘item’—but the film could very well have done without the Priya character, since the catalyst for Arjun’s change is a young teenager Reshma (Sulagna Panigrahi), Dheeraj’s latest victim.

The Bhatts may very well have hit on their hands—people still remember Murder—but they have stooped really low this time, and the censors have to do their jobs better if they are to justify their existence.