'Marjaavaan' movie review: Sidharth Malhotra fails to floor us

A three-foot villain with ‘daddy issues’. A hero who can fend off 15-20 men on his own and leap off multi storey buildings with ease. A heroine with amazing screen presence and little to do but smile charmingly and cry copiously when the occasion calls for it.
To be fair director Milap Zaveri (Masti, Satyamev Jayate) doesn’t promise much even if you just go by the trailer of Mar-jaavaan. But what unfolds on screen for 2 hours and 15 minutes is an example of a plot rendered shallow with cliches, heavy-duty dialogues (courtesy Zaveri’s calling card as a dialogue writer for films including Ek Villain), and over the top dramatics. Not that these haven’t worked for Bollywood movies in the past. But when one hour into the movie, a scene comes up which could well pass off as the end, and you are searching for the exit, and realise you have to sit through more than another hour, it doesn’t bode well for anyone.
Raghu (Sidharth Malhotra) is a loyal henchman to the local gangster Narayan Anna who controls the water mafia in Mumbai. His father’s dependence on Raghu doesn’t sit well with Vishnu (Riteish Deshmukh), whose complexes arise from more than his short stature cause he is the only one who constantly draws attention to the fact that he is only three feet tall. So when Raghu falls for Zoya (Tara Sutaria), a musically inclined Kashmiri girl, Vishnu jumps at the opportunity to use it to discredit his father’s most favourite goon.
There are fist fights aplenty in keeping with the theme of the movie. Bullets are fired without impunity. Dead bodies pile up and there are more villains than you can count. Somehow in the midst of all this Raghu, who doesn’t hesitate to finish off his boss’s adversaries upon being ordered to do so, comes out smelling like a rose. That apparently is the effect of love. Interestingly, Rakul Preet, who is credited with a special appearance, has more scenes than the lead heroine! She plays the glossy bar dancer, Arzoo, and breaks into a couple of dances to justify her presence.
 
 


Marjaavaan falls several shades short of a Bollywood masala entertainer that it aspires to, inspite of having all the ingre-dients for it. The weak and cliched plotline along with over-the-top histrionics and melodramatic dialogues, that should have impressed but end up sounding hollow, is only part of the problem. Watch this at your own peril.
ambica@khaleejtimes.com