Movie Review: Badla

Producer- Red Chillies

Director- Sujoy Ghosh

Star Cast- Amitabh Bachchan, Taapsee Pannu , Tony Luke and Amrita Singh

Genre- Thriller

Rating- **

VERBOSE AND ILLOGICAL!

Jyothi Venkatesh

The story of Badla, which is based on the Spanish movie Contratiempo (The Invisible Guest), has a very interesting premise but somewhere along the way, director Sujoy Ghosh starts getting very repetitive and the film ends up as a verbose stage play with only two characters dominating every frame. Though a frame to frame official remake of Spanish thriller, the film stays largely faithful to the original version with only a minor change of swapping of the gender of the main characters.

The film is about a young married entrepreneur Naina Sethi (Tapsee Pannu) finds herself in a locked hotel room next to the body of her dead lover Arjun (Tony Luke). Hoping to find answers, she hires her lawyer Jimmy (Manav Kaul) to help her crack the case. Jimmy in turn sends to her the senior advocate Badal Gupta (Amitabh Bachchan) to help her prove her ‘innocence’. Badal Gupta (Amitabh Bachchan) is a man with a track record of winning every case in 40 years of his career and promises to help Naina solve the mystery of what really happened in just the three hours at his disposal.

Both Taapsee Pannu and Amitabh Bachchan try to replicate and recreate their magic earlier in Pink with Badla, but for those who have seen the 2016 courtroom drama, it almost becomes too monotonous to watch them in almost the same characters here. However, to give them their dues, both Amitabh Bachchan and Tapsee are outstanding and try to rise above their ill etched roles. Amrita Singh is superb in her role as the mother of the young son who she loses in an accident

Though the locations in Glasgow have been picturised superbly by the cinematographer, unfortunately the film move s on at a snail’s pace and gets far too verbose and theatrical for your comfort with the twists and turns being unfurled in a leisurely manner in the form of frequent flashbacks which tend to confuse you. The climax is a bit of a dampener in the sense that it takes the viewer for granted and instead of trying to tighten the lose strings in the screenplay, the director just employs the age old trick of the face mask to solve the missing gaps in his illogical plot, a la the Rajesh Khanna starrer The Train.

To sum up, the film the promotion of which is way below the mark does not have a chance to run in single screens as it will be patronized mainly by the youth and fails to live up to the hype that it has created before the release, making us wonder what on earth prompted Shah Rukh Khan to take over the film as a producer, when he does not even act in it.

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