Shaitaan – How cool killed the tale…

Anurag Kashyap’s production has brought out a movie called “Shaitaan” planning to expose an inner devil in us. It is also co produced by Getaway films and directed by Bejoy Nambiar. These facts though worthless are important to be noted because this is the future of Hindi film making and it also promises us to be meaningful. So what did the expose on the inner devil do to the audience? Bored the devil out of them!

Shaitaan is a tale of urban spoilt kids. They engage in the usual drink and drugs. The mix of the kids’ group is quite diverse. There is the ultra rich kid, the pseudo cool kid and couple of wannabes you will find around every guy that has money. The movie begins with the introduction of the mentally traumatic Kalki Koechlin to this group. The movie largely contains scenes of the typical “I don’t care” behavior of this group. They are all rebellious, lie and cheat their parents and are into every type of conceivable vice. The other character of the movie is the ultra committed policeman in Rajeev Khandelwal whose marriage and career are threatened because of his severe commitment to justice. In hope that atleast one of the 4 readers of my blog wouldn’t have seen the movie I will not divulge a lot of the story. But let’s just say that the kids expectedly get into trouble and more trouble ensues. Media has a field day with the trouble and police in the form of Rajeev get involved. The end of the movie is as meaningless as the beginning making the whole movie pointless.

Several sensational news stories are projected in Shaitaan. And every normal scene is shot differently. That’s where the movie suffers enormously. You know the story and how it is going to unfold. But the way every scene is made with an element of cool and is made so unusual makes the story lose its authenticity. The movie sports 4 unfamiliar faces and that of Kalki. To be fair to them they did pull off their roles really well. But none of the roles really had an impact. Kalki looked neither pretty as an NRI kid nor scary enough to be psychotic. The actors showed promise but they were caught enacting their own bit in their worlds. Inspector Malwankar is played by a now increasingly familiar face Raj Kumar Yadav. We saw him in LSD and Ragini MMS. Take my advice and watch out for him. He is a great talent and hopefully will do a lot more movies. He has a small role but plays out really well. Rajeev Khandelwal plays the angry young inspector. Quite honestly, the role has become a stereotype. But like Gavaskar says “The ball was wide but it still had to be hit”, Rajeev plays out the part really well.

The movie fails in having a central idea of what it wants to drive home as a message. It wasn’t an episode from someone’s diary so it should culminate to mean something. That’s where the movie led to an abyss. Too many threads were opened and no knots were made.  The movie had potential and the story was not a different one but a strong one. The subject ended up being treated poorly. A lot of offense was taken by one movie reviewer because this movie was compared to a Tarantino or a Ritchie make. In my opinion it was nothing like any of them. Better screenplay, better editing and definitely better focus from the director would have seen a Shaitan we would have loved, however ironic that may sound.