DUBAI: "The superheroes in Ra.One are so cool you will need two jackets when you watch the movie," Shah Rukh Khan boasted at a press meet ahead of its Monday premiere in Dubai. I don't know if anyone needed two jackets, but I certainly needed two aspirins.
I'm not suggesting you should not bother watching it. Despite its many foibles, the disjointed, scrappy low-tech plot still has some passable entertaining moments which people below average intelligence might enjoy.
As for kids, who we are told are the target audience, they shouldn't touch this movie with a barge pole because of its crude dialogues and innuendoes.
So what's gone wrong? The floundering narrative or the unimaginative direction? Perhaps both. Perhaps everything.
THE STORYLINE
We are introduced to a frizzy hair Shekhar Subramanium (Shah Rukh Khan) a Tamil video-game creator (some Tamils might take offence to the stereotype projection) married to Sonia (Kareena Kapoor) for better or worse. He couldn't do better and she couldn't do worse - he's always bumbling and she's preoccupied with a research paper on Indian abuses. Give us a break, someone.
In between desperately trying to retain his job at Barron Industries and to redeem himself in front of his son Prateek (Armaan Verma), Shekhar designs a virtual reality game. But there's a minor hitch. The game's ruthless character, Ra.One, develops artificial intelligence and steps out of the gaming console into the real world. His single-minded pursuit is to hunt down and destroy Prateik. And what did the little boy do to incur his mindless wrath? He dared to beat him on two gaming levels. Ahem.
Anyone who tries to stop Ra. One dies and that includes poor Shekhar. Now nerdy Prateik has to resurrect the metallic blue G.One designed by the departed dad to save his skin. Does that remind anyone of Tron Legacy?
The film splutters to life a few times, but each time the tacky storyline weighs it down. G.One is introduced just before interval and Arjun Rampal, much later, by which time you want to give the director's system a reboot if not a real boot.
INCOHERENT PLOT
Curiously, in the first half it seemed the movie has got its heart in the right place. But the intelligence shown by director Anubhav Sinha and six writers (one wonders if they wrote a scene each) in the second half, much like the protagonist and antagonist, look very artificial. The result: an unmitigated disaster that you must watch only if you have nothing better to do.
The action sequences, particularly the Spiderman-inspired runaway train stopping scene are brilliant, no doubt, but devoid of logical reasoning - they look as out of place as an auto rickshaw would on Shaikh Zayed Road.
Comparisons are odious. As a sci-fi flick, Ra.One is marginally better than Drona but not even remotely close to Robot, though it might still make a lot of money, riding on massive publicity,
Anubhav Sinha has hinted there will be a sequel to Ra.One. It could be the endgame for both him and Khan.
Thumbs up
Action sequences, Chammak Challo, Dildara... songs
Thumbs down
Crude dialogues, no emotional quotient, weak storyline, terrible direction
