5 Worst Films Of The Year 2018

1.     Patakha:  It’s been downhill all the way for Vishal Bhardwaj who for some strange reason continues to hold a messianic moviemaker’s reputation in spite  of  churning out dud after  dud. If you thought it wouldn’t get any worse for Bhardwaj after  the  colossal  fiasco  Rangoon, then you were wrong. Monstrously wrong. Patakha was  even worse than Rangoon.And that’s saying  a lot. The story of two warring sisters, played with do-or-die frenzy by SanyaMalhotra and  Radhika Madan, the flare-ups between the  two grimy unwashed  uncouth  sisters  were shot  likekabaddi matches. Only, this was  no Dangal. What WAS Patakha???!! I am still trying to figure out its dusty filthy ambience with  dialogues to match. While Sanya and  Radhika rolled on the floor in a raging fury, Sunil Grover clapped and  cheered them on.Clearly he  lacked  genuine  entertainment  in  his life. So did we. For almost three tortuous hours as one sister went  blind, the  went deaf,we  just went numb watching an accomplished director lose hismojo .

2.     Race  2:  By the time  Salman  Khan ripped off his short and  Bobby Deol followed suit, I  was  ready to rip off my hair in exasperation. This maddening  mishmash of  hot babes and  cool  guys(including Anil Kapoor who lets his  beard  grow grey and his accent falter from angrezi to Bhojpuri, all for  a  cause)  was   a  roaring grunting mess  of  a movie.Trashy beyond endurance, loud  beyond  the threshold of  tolerance and  outrageous  beyond all definitions of  lowbrow entertainment,Race 3  gives a bad name to the Salman Khan brand. Just when we  thought he was  trying to build a more durable variety of mass entertainment by reinventing himself in  Bajrangi  Bhaijan , Sultan and the unfortunate  Tubelight, Race 3 came along to remind us  with infuriating  aggressiveness, that when it comes  to Salman Khan there is a very thin line between  rationale and  absurdity.He skips jumps and  crosses over into the  kingdom of crassness with  such daring  impunity  that you wonder what lies ahead  in store for  this  hero of  the masses who it seems, has  decided to abandon all efforts  to give  a performance. Here in Race 3 Salman was  so indifferent and  openly bored by the bustling  balderdash  he makes no effort to  make sense  of the  tangled mess of  a plot.Sensible decision. Race 2 makes as  much sense as  Rakhi Sawant quotes or Aamir Khan’s nose ring in Thugs Of Hindostan.

3.     Baaghi 2: This was  an overblown, padded-up and puffed-out adaptation of the engrossing Telugu hit ‘Kshanam’ about an NRI who is summoned back to India by his former girlfriend to find her kidnapped daughter. Tiger Shroff somersaulted over flying choppers, flipped over conifers, flew across cars and vanquished adversaries with the quick-thinking machismo of a sumo wrestler thrown into a ring with a cunning and dangerous canine.

 Tiger’s Ranveer stops at nothing. The trouble is, the film doesn’t know where to stop either. The original plot had some interesting twists and turns in the kidnapping drama.In the remake the drama of a distressed mother (DishaPatani, so one-note and so pale and pretty your heart reaches out to her for all the wrong reasons) and her saviour is converted into a loud scream-fest where everyone has a ‘bawl’.There is so much sound and fury in the storytelling that I was convinced it signified something . Alas, all I came away with was a convoluted attempt to regurgitate a solid thriller by injecting large doses of bombast and melodrama into the original.

4.     Thugs Of Hindostan:  Not done!  You can’t  take two of Bollywood’s biggest superstars  Amitabh Bachchan and Aamir Khan together  for the  first time and then make a  film that  confounds  your  senses, boggles  your mind and  tries your patience.Thugs Of Hindostan did  all of this, and more. It was guilty of many crimes, not the least of   them being  the rather  strange  attempt to pass off the corny as the epic, and the dishevelled as the spectacular. This is  an overblown, undercooked piece of abomination masquerading  as majestic when it is nothing of the sort. Speckled on top and hollow and  dull inside this is  the kind of con-job which a door-to-door salesman  for  an icky  brand  of  perfume  sells to you when your olfactory nerves  are not working.

5.     Love Soniya: This well-intended melodrama about  human trafficking and  child prostitution  had  its heart in  the right place . Sadly, the perversities that  ought to have galvanized the director into action, seem to finally drag the film down to the very level where the sub-human culture of the flesh trade  exists.There  is something  fundamentally amiss in a film where a posse  of  capable actors get together  to create  a messy tribute to the Bleeding Heart’s Club. The  narrative seems  to be  a diehard  fan of its own  righteousness. Often times, the sexual violence  is  repugnant not for being  excessively  graphic(which it is) but because the sadism seems  to  be  disturbingly gratuitous,leading us  into believing that in some cases , cinema  about sexual violence  gets so close to  its subject that it loses its dispassion and ends  up celebrating rather than abnegating  the  violence.Love Sonia  meant well.  No doubt about that.Regrettably , so does the guy who randomly shoots down innocent  people in a pub as what he thinks to be solution to ethnic inundation.