Rating: **
For all his outre swagger, Vishal Bhardwaj’s cinema has never really found its groove. The closest he came to finding peace in his restless filmmaking was in Kaminey where Shahid Kapoor pulled off a double role convincingly.
In O’Romeo Kapoor seems to suffer from a multiple personality disorder. One minute he is Al Capone, the next minute a lovelorn Romeo and then finally just a puppet in the hands of the jittery screenwriter, Shahid’s Ustra is anything but razor-sharp. When he is supposed to be sexy and quick-witted he is just plain insolent(note the way he heckles his grandma Farida Jalal). And when he is trying to be a hopeless romantic, he is just hopeless. Period.
The period is the late 1990s, songs from Aashiqui blare in the background . Nothing else suggests any serious periodicity.
More often than not, Vishal Bhardwaj and Rohan Narula’s screenplay brims over with balderdash. The film opens so unimpressively—with Shahid’s Ustara trashing his enemies in a movie theatre to the sound of Dhak dhak karne laga—things ,we think, couldn’t get any worse.
They do, and they don’t. While parts of the ostensibly grand passion between Ustara and Afshan(Tripti Dimri) ignite with the purported passion, most of the time the two look like strangers trying to hide their awkwardness in staged courtship.
We are supposed to believe that Ustara,an incurable womaniser, falls so hard in love that forgets his own selfinterest and becomes a selfless love machine.
“Itna pyar koi kissise kaise kar sakta,” Afshan mumbles, while the screenplay stumbles and finally collapses in a heap.
It is hard to believe that so many promising artistes could come together for something so banal and brutal. The gore is finally a bore. And the supposedly epic romance conveys all the passion of two inflated dummies in a showroom.
Some of Shahid Kapoor’s dramatic moments are unintentionally funny: when his friends(by the way Hussain Dalal is the best performer in this dhaba version of Tarantino) try to get his mind off his lovergirl by bringing home(home being an abandoned ship) a whore, he bursts into sobs. Soon all his friends are sobbing too, while the audience gets relief in laughter(all 9 of us in the theatre).
While Shahid does hold his own once in a while, Tripti Dimri as a woman on a vendetta spree is disastrously one-note. She lacks the gravity and grace to be convincing as a woman wronged. The expressions of agony and anguish are more to do with a schoolgirl panicking in an exam hall than a woman whose grief makes her a raging weapon.
Avinash Tiwary spends most of his screen time in a bullfight arena in Spain. Don’t ask why. Even more baffling is his hammy performance.Must be the Spanish weather. Tamannah Bhatia who plays his wife, paints a blue moon, probably to remind us of the frequency of a gangster film so awful.
O’Romeo brings out the beast in everyone. By the time Nana Patekar(yes,he is in it too) ends up on a hospital bed mumbling Dhak dhak karne laga , the screenplay lies writhing smashed against the nearest wall.My question to the makers of this monstrously inflated mishmash is, why waste so much resources in glorifying a gangster?
Look for the real hero. The man in the audience who sits through three hours of mindless mayhem masquerading as epic cinema.
