Just imagine, you visit a clothing line store who’s designer has been the talk of the town since the last garments he designed sold like hot cakes and he made a whopping amount of Rs. 100 crore from the same. This season, he designed a shirt that everyone was looking forward to wearing the minute the shutters went up and the stores were open for the customers. He used a sexy hunk like fabric, fit in a beautiful set of delicate buttons that entangled it together and used a shade of colour like never seen before. This shirt was marketed with abundant excellence and lured the customers toward it thus raising the expectations manifold. The consumers rushed in and bought the shirt, but as soon as they put it on it started wearing off and ripped itself apart, as the designer forgot the absolute basic yet most important element that would keep the shirt bound together for a pleasurable wearing experience i.e the thread used to weave the shirt into one solid product.
The shirt is nothing different from Mohit Suri’s recent dark (apparently) love story – ‘Ek Villain’ with the thread being a metaphor for the script of the film. Without looking at Ek villain as an inspiration from ‘Kim Jee Woon’s’ 2010 South Korean masterpiece ‘I saw the devil’, lets look at it as an individual entity sans any comparison to the prior. For me ‘Ek Villain’ was an utter disappointment as it flawed endlessly.
It all began with the script being extremely loose and failing to captivate me beyond the first half an hour of the film, As the entire film unfolded itself in the first half and got done with whatever it had but the interval point. The second half was just an excuse to use all the money the filmmakers had. Throughout the film I failed to get a hold of the geographical setting of the film, Dribbling between Goa & Mumbai, it generated nothing but confusion for the audience. The performances in the film were half decent with Siddharth Malhotra trying his level best to perform well, with a constant angry/constipated/god knows what the hell is happening here look on his face (His look was the most consistent element in the film). Shraddha Kapoor sounds like a robot who has been made to remember her lines and recites them in a monotonously irritating tone. Ritesh Deshmukh takes you by surprise as the ‘villain’ who has done a good job if not for the audience, then atleast for himself after his last debacle at the box office (what was that film? ‘Judwaa’ or ‘Ek Hi Chehra’ or whatever, I forgot). Even the music of the film failed for me especially after the entire hoo-haa that followed the music of ‘Ashiqui 2’. I believe the theme music and Background Music works the best (THAT flute piece from ‘Galiyaan’ that gives you goosebumps, yeah that one).
But most of all what went wrong with ‘Ek Villain’ for me was the fact that I left the theatre with a void unfilled. I just felt incomplete and missing a lot. I am a person who loves is antagonist way more than his protagonist (unabashed to say it) and was expecting something similar with ‘Ek villain’, which it failed to deliver. I dare one filmmaker to do absolute justice to it’s antagonist with out falling prey to the ‘good wins over bad’ theory. The film doesn’t justify Ritesh’s behavior full heartedly, I wanted to see a back story there about his psychology and what made him the devil he is today, instead I got a shitty back story for Siddharth’s character which could might as well have been omitted. I was expecting much more darkness in Ritesh and his actions, and a consistency in his devious behavior which for some odd reason rises toward the end of the film, that wants to make you hate a fiend like him. However, you just land up hating the film instead. The action in the film is equally unexciting and you wish to get done with it.
Other elements like an item song by Prachi Desai (That chick from Rock on) with off sync lip movement (technical flaw) and characters like Ritesh’s friend KRK (NO not the IPL team, that dude from Deshdrohi, what? You don’t… forget it) and the ‘cant-speak-hindi-coz-I-am-from-Goa/Bandra/Mahim’ Remo Fernandes are totally unwanted and further spoil the already stale plot.
Ek villain is a film with tremendous scope to have been made into a masterpiece but fails thoroughly. After all this lamenting and bantering it might be a 100 crore at the box office but surely years later one would have to tax their brains trying to remember and say ‘Arrey aayi thi naa who Ritesh Deshmukh ki EK FILM…’.
The Seventh Sense 