Bravery goes Awry

The movie starts nicely, with Rahul Bose bungee jumping. Then cuts to him at a party, uselessly explaining the excitement of the jump to a housewife. Now why was he trying to talk to an auntie at his friend's engagement party. And why does an engagement party have precisely four young people against a horde of older ones?

This goes on throughout the movie, one good scene pitted against another quite useless one.

Story :

Javed Khan (Deepak Dobriyal) is an army officer accused of killing his senior officer at point blank range. He has not attempted to escape, nor said anything in self-defence. Major Akash (Javed Jaffery) is the prosecution cousel at the courtmartial of Javed. It is supposed to be an open and shut case, and they cant find a defence lawyer, so Akash arranges for his friend Major Siddhant (Rahul Bose) to step in. As the location is Srinagar, Siddhant treats it as a fun posting and makes plans accordingly. Kaavya Shastri (Minissha Lamba) is posted in Srinagar as the rookie reporter of Dainik Bhaskar. (Oh really ! do national newspapers send a rookie to a place like Srinagar, and that too a woman?) Anyhow, Kaavya pretends to be Siddhant's cousin to gain entry into the forbidden army territory and get some scoops on the Javed Khan story. She shakes up Siddhant and gets him into trouble for talking to reporters.

However, the offshoot of this encounter is that Siddhant gets serious about the business at hand which is bad news for Brig. Rudra Pratap Singh (Kay Kay Menon), who seems to be involved in all this.

Other things

The movie is based on A Few Good Men that starred Tom Cruise, Jack Nicholson and Demi Moore. I thought it had been indianised well, bringing in the angle of an army officer disillusioned by the false encounters and muslim haters.

Good Scenes

The Kavya-Sidhant encounter was very well done. He is blabbering away trying to impress a pretty girl, while she is cool and collected, and delivers her punch at the end. I could see the movie again just to watch this scene.

The initial Brigadier-Sidhant scenes were very well handled too. Kay Kay is perfect as ever, as a Brigadier full of grandiloqence, cowing a Major to near silence. Rahul Bose is perfect too, as a man cowed down by a senior officer. During the second encounter - there was a great dialogue built around a single malt whiskey and the word 'nice'. Again, a scene I could watch again.

However !

The climax was just not able to live up to all the buildup. The evidence is too sketchy and not convincing enough, and was not been elobrated enough. A couple of quick scenes, and the movie is over. Deepak Dobriyal is an amazing actor, but he was made to stare fixedly ahead most times. There were stock shots of Rahul Bose walking about the Army area, and sitting in the court room looking around which were repeated. And even a lay person like me could figure out these were stock shots. The movie was so well written in parts, that you feel bad at the portions that did not work, because of shoddy writing. It is like a good promise gone bad. Well, maybe Samar Khan will improve and come up with something better soon.

Performances

This is definately a plus point in this movie. Rahul Bose, Kay Kay, Javed Jaffery, Deepak Dobriyal, Minissha Lamba, and the pretty girl who plays Javed Jaffery's fiance, are all good actors. Rahul Bose is cute too ! He looks good in a uniform. Javed looks a tad old for the role, but acts well. He even gets to dance a bit (too little). Minissha wears lovely salwar kameez and churidars here. I even stole one dress idea from this, a printed salwar with a plain kameez. She was good as the feisty journalist on a ramshackle scooter. Amrita Rao has a small role, which she does ok with.

The cinematography is pleasing. The songs, just a couple, are sweet.
Nothing wrong with seeing the movie, its quite wholesome on the whole.