Attack! Customized Mayhem

Attack

Rating: ** ½

Attack Review: John Abraham who  not only stars  but  also takes credit as  co-writer  and co-producer in this  crazily hurried  political thriller about the Parliament under a  terror attack, has some  rewarding moments of  humour in  the  otherwise drab adventure drama.

Initially when he is seen  wooing air hostess Jacqueline Fernandez on a  plane while   travelling to god-knows-where ,he keeps  giving her moontstuck looks and finally asks her name.When she  tells  him it’s Ayesha, he wants to know  aage-peeche kya hai, meaning her  surname.

“Just Ayesha,” drawls JF, “Like Madonna.”

How cool is that.  Okay , another cool moment when  cabinet  adviser  Prakash Raj comes to  pay   a visit to  wheelchair-bound John Abraham  a soldier who goes down(almost)  during a clumsily staged airport attack, asks John chattily  how  things are  going.

“Oh. Very hectic. No time  at all,” John gives it back to the  insensitive  government official.

Attack has very few such smile-inducing moments. Most  of  the way  it mows down all sense and  sensibility for a gun-happy  rampage  about a task-force soldier who is fitted with  some   chip that gives him super-powers.

 Really,now! If wishes were horses  and if only  such wish-fulfilment  vessels  made less sound and more sense. To  director  Lakshya Raj Anand and editor Aarif Sheikh’s credit the pace never  flags. But that  is not always a  good thing.  Oftentimes, pace is  sacrificed for grace.And we end up looking at a  stormraiser with its legs  up in the air.

The  awkwardness is  especially noticeable  in the scenes showing the cabinet  politics. Once  the Prime Minister is taken hostage, the boorish home minister(Rajit Kapur) takes over  with all the tact of a bull in a  China shop.

The one-man army theory is  stretched to ludicrous limits. If  you can buy into a wheelchair -bound soldier suddenly  acquiring  super-powers then  you can  have a spot of fun with the customized  mayhem.Otherwise Attack looks like one  more  attempt by John  Abraham to muscle into Akshay Kumar’s territory.

I  liked the scenes between John and  his screen mother  played by the  lovely Ratna Pathak Shah. They are shot in  beautiful bluesy tones and convey the  agile man’s  anguish  after being rendered  immobile. After John is  endowed  with  the ability to beat the shit out of  the terrorists it is  business  as usual. Isn’t that what he  was doing in his  last film Satyamev Jayate 2 even without  the chip in his  brain, and on his  shoulder?

The  best performance  in  Attack comes  from Serena  Walia as  the voice in John’s head. She is what the film aspires  to be: smart and savvy.