Chehre | Not A Movie Review by Movie insert | Amitabh Bachchan, Emraan Hashmi | MOVIE INSERT

  

First movie in a preview theatre in 1.5 years! Will I cry? Will I fall asleep? Will I be able to watch at a stretchwithout needing a break for a snack? Also, will I cry? Rumi Jaffery’s Chehre is releasing todayin theatres, if you chose to go watch, please be responsible, do not takeyour masks off at any point. And you know, general things like,don’t text if you're sitting next to someone. Nahi, dekho, bohot time ho gaya hai,protocols bhool jaata hai insaan. So, a group of retired law professionals periodicallygather in a huge Umbrella Academy style mansion to do natakiya roopantaran of old cases, kyunki retirement ke baad yehi kaam bacha haiinke paas karne ko, sabke paas bohot paise hain. One day, a man gets stuck in a blizzard andis directed to this mansion to spend the night by one of these lawyers, and after a few drinks,he agrees to participate in the game. No points for guessing, everything is not asit seems, these people are clearly unhinged. Escape room sub-genre of thrillers likethe Saw series, Vikramditya Motwane’s Trapped, Room for which Brie Larson won an Oscar,must make the setting, the room they’re in, an important accessory to the storytelling. You’ve got to see the space the protagonistis trapped in, as an adversary, as the villain out to get him. It is the flat’s fault Rajkummar Rao is trappedwith a broken lock, no electricity or water. If a character is held hostage,the basement better be soundproof, because if it is just another basement, you don’t have a strong enough opponent for your story. Mogambo ki lair mein bhi ek kamra hai jahaanse nuclear missile activate hone waali hain, you’ve got to find your way there to that room, Bhool Bhulaiyya mein poori haveli is dangerous,Tumbbad, I'm Thinking of Ending Things, etc. etc. Chehre, a title I don’t quite understand,is set in, aforementioned mansion, about 280 kms from Delhi, a signboard tells us. Dear viewer, it looks like the Swiss Alps. An unbelievable amount of snow coverseach surface, beautiful tall pine trees, winding glittering empty roads, there’s evena CGI frozen lake type which turns into a ravine, all of this and more, yeh sabhi aapko milegaDilli se sirf 250 km ke aas paas. Na fam, Chandigarh milega, jaana hai? Khair, geography aside,let's come back to the mansion. Why does only one judge live here? What other rooms does it have? If the front and back doors have lockson them, how does one escape this aggressively mahogany prison? Then there is the house help, which ina mansion like this is SUPPOSED to be spooky, that’s the format. Get Out being the best example,there is an important backstory there. It's critical either to the entrapmentor escape, right? The butler did it, might be a cliché, buteven if you're subverting, and the butler in fact did not do it, shady butler has gotto have SOME relevance to the plot, no? Rhea Chakraborty and Siddhant Kapoorare the house helps here. Rhea is Anna, the house keeper, she'straditionally attractive, she's paints gory paintings and hangs them up in the guest room.She's also prone to bizarre outbursts of laughter. She and the other house help Joe,they have stories which are sad, but, they're not related to the main conflictof the movie’s central plot line, at all. Emraan Hashmi is a cocky ad agency guy, who is playing a cocky ad agency guy. You know what I’m saying na,you can hear him say: “I like action. Living life in the fast lane”. Frankly, first half movie ka interesting tha kaafi.It had me hooked, ki abhi twist aayega, abhi ghar mein tehkhaana khulega, abhi kuchRaghubir Yadav ki khurafat dikhaayenge. Par all of that is undone in one fell swoopwhen Rumi Jaffery decides to USE Emraan Hashmi. There’s a VERY long flashback sequence withsexy scenes, lady in pool, product placement, romantic songs. It's all very Aashiq BanayaAapne. Toh jab tak you return to the pretty but pretty pointless mansion, you’ve longforgotten ki chal kya raha tha, eye rolls se pehle. Amitabh Bachchan gets oneBIZARRE scene towards the climax. It is SO long! He's being a lawyer, he starts talking abouthis case to the judge in their little game, and phir writer Ranjit Kapoor goesFULL ON stream of consciousness and he makes this charactergive daleels about everything ranging from sexual assault to corruptionto what really is justice after all and crescendoes to “This decadence ofhuman values and humanity has to stop!”, which I’m still trying to decipher. It doesn’t help that he’s delivering this longmonologue standing in one place, one frame, he's talking to a character off camera,perhaps reading off a teleprompter. So, despite it being AMITABH BACHCHAN,the whole thing is more tiresome than impressive. Mr. Bachchan is credited as “friendly appearance”for “tax reasons”, according to a Rumi Jaffery interview. Maybe it's because of tax reasons the openingcredits song, filmed on Mr. Bachchan, has terrible CGI of dollar bills on fire. Not rupees, dollars. For tax reasons. So, on a scale of 1 to 10 Chehre is… 2 vaccine ke dose lage ki nahi lage? Theatre jaana hai toh dekh lo bhai apna apna. Film Companion ko subscribe toh karo chalo,safely, from your home.