REVIEW: Murder 2

SOMEONE PLEASE HACK THIS FILM AND DESTROY THE EVIDENCE

The poster of Mohit Suri's Murder 2 derives from Lars Von Trier's Antichrist. The plot from some unknown Korean film and in part, from Silence of the Lambs. But the curious combination of soft-porn, psycho-babbling and myths about chudails is entirely indigenous to C-grade Hindi cinema. As also the dragging, heavy-handed treatment.

Like all slasher films, mutilation and humiliation of women is involved, and in case the makers think this is merely vicarious entertainment, let me tell you that in a horrific scene towards the end, when the villain is standing menacingly over an already traumatised girl and about to hack her to pieces, she wets her pants and members of the audience giggle! There's nothing harmless about this kind of cinema and by stretching the plot senselessly, Suri only makes it worse.

Equally damaging is the casting of the lead actors, where the guy who plays the villain (Prashant Narayanan) is a highly skilled performer and the 'anti-hero'—the psychobabble involves a dead mother who sold candles outside a church and much existential angst which drives him to give up his police job and become a pimp and drug dealer—is a wooden Emran Hashmi (I kept trying to find any hint of real emotion in his eyes, but all I could see was a reflection of Rajesh Khanna's bad acting form and a hideous wig to boot!).

To be fair, Hashmi has done better than this, but because Narayanan swallows up the film, he complicates the issue. Not that anyone cares about justice or catharsis. The consumer for this kind of film is a predominantly male audience that's happy to watch Yana Gupta wriggle around in leather pants and gyrate to some of the most obscene choreography one has seen on screen, before getting hacked and dumped in a well. By now you know that Narayanan is a serial killer of the scariest kind. But it's not enough to show him as a psychopath. He must also be a cross-dresser who tortured his wife, castrated himself, and now chops up prostitutes (at one point he confesses he's not partial to them, he'll just cut up any woman that comes his way) for a sport.

Then there's a lust angle involving Hashmi and Jacqueline Fernandez which, in the context of what follows, is somewhat tolerable—even though there's just a lot of skin on show and nothing else. But you suddenly start appreciating such priceless gems as "tum na toh meri mohabbat ho, na zaroorat, sirf aadat ho". And Hashmi keeps reiterating it in every scene with Fernandez, who can carry off skimpy clothes, but certainly can't act.

As for the connection with Anurag Basu's Murder, the serial killer sings "Bheege honth tere" before he kills these women. Go figure.