If you are a fence sitter in the nepotism debate, then Genius is the movie which will tip the balance towards #NoToNepotism!
Nawazuddin Siddiqui is ‘the’ find of Bollywood cinema for this decade, his performance especially dialogue delivery with uncharacteristic poise is simply amazing. However, when nepotism gets in the way, we hear his voice but the camera is focused on an another actor, pure sacrilege! and you realize that the actor has to be the son of the producer or director.
The only thing good about the movie experience was that I did not pay for the tickets. Nawazuddin is grossly underutilized, so much so that we can call it a guest appearance. The ‘hero’ of the movie is determined to be everything. He tries to be Sunny Deol, who can down a dozen people with his sheer power, however the entire muscles of his body might weigh less than the ‘dhai kilo ka haath’ render all the fight sequences ridiculous.
The hero is also super smart, hence he is the JEE topper. Yet, this ‘smart’ fellow chooses IIT Roorkee for his studies, someone forgot to tell him that Roorkee is way down the pecking order, so much so that Powai/Delhi/Lucknow/Kharagpur/Chennai do not really consider Roorkee as an IIT!
The highlight of the movie is his smart-phone. It controls everything, from traffic lights, to imaginary lights rising from the grass, opening doors, to wirelessly connecting to contact lenses, bank servers and hack into mail accounts And on the other hand is my smart phone after the latest iOS update it shows notification of ‘1 new mail’ and when I enter the mail app there are no unread messages.
To say that the plot is disjointed will be generous, here is an example. In the initial scenes the hero is injured such that he ends up in coma for several months and recovers back, but has a limp, a stick and great pain in his legs. He is mocked in a meeting as being ‘disable’ for the job of secret agent. However later on in the movie he has to chase a culprit, so he has to run, but then how can he run? So we are shown a high tech implant on his legs which mysteriously snaps to his legs and enables him to run without limp or pain. Then we are told he was not chasing a culprit but a car on which the Indian flag is inverted, he corrects the orientation. However after a few scenes the person in the car is actually the culprit. Then after a few scenes we are told to forget about the hi tech implant and the truth is that the hero was just ‘acting’ out to create a trap for the culprits. Wait there is more, then the story is modified that the was ‘acting’, not to create a trap, but create an exit strategy for him to leave the spy job and go back to his lady love, wait!, but he is a true patriot hence in spite of having an exit strategy he intends to go back to his job and complete his job, wait!, but choosing between chasing the criminal and saving his lady love, he chooses to save his lady love, wait!, the bomb on his lady love is fake and the real bomb is in the temple, wait! no worry he is the Olympic javelin world record holder so he can pick the bomb and throw it miles into the sea, oh sorry, there is no sea, there is a river and on the other side there are people so the bomb ….. exhausted?….. me too!
The absurdities of the movie are not only with the plot but with extend to everything. We hear a composed by Himmesh song in male voice which is part of the hero’s dream sequence, then there a good five minutes of serious scenes, and then the same song is repeated in female voice now presumably part of the lady love’s dream, the same song, the same full length duration of it!
Besides the mobile the devices in the movie are incredibly high tech. A bomb detection radar which can detect bombs within a couple of miles radius, yet the device is fooled by cadmium paint on toys. The glass doors where secret meetings are hi tech and have in built finger print sensors, hence you have touch the glass face for authentication, yet for some reason they are transparent glass, and anyone outside can see the secret meeting from outside and also hear what is happening inside.
The lady love is presumably there to be eye candy, yet we do not see much of her, because when she is speaking the rare dialogue, you are right!, the camera is focused on the our Hero.
The character imagined for the role is a cross between Rambo-Sherlock-Deol-Shahrukh with twenty percent of reel time devoted to close ups in the respective avatar, of the remaining twenty, fifteen are devoted to technology, three to the lady love, and the rest to Nawazuddin
Oh yes and there is also Mithun in the movie and the end of the movie he has a smirk on his face, I am sure in his mind he was saying, ‘My 1988 Commando movie was better than this!’
Hello i am kavin, its my first occasion to commenting anyplace, when i read this article i thought i
could also create comment due to this brilliant article.
Heya this is somewhat of off topic