INSIPID GUNS-AND-ROMANCE SPREE

Kill Oil

STARRING: Govinda, Ranveer Singh, Ali Zafar, Parineeti Chopra

DIRECTOR: Shaad Ali ~ X';{

Kill Di/ is one of those misfired gun shots of masala cinema that reads like a fun-fest on paper I am sure everyone must have been ROFL (Ranveer's semi-illiterate character doesn't even know what RO FL means, teehee!) while shooting and enacting the scenes, and even before that there must have loads of laughter while reading the script

In principle these unprincipled characters who live and die by the gun must have seemed interesting. On screen Kill Di/ is as flat as the midriff that Ranveer loves to flaunt whenever the script permits Not that the scr ipt here is too particular about what goes and what doesn't

This is a free -for- all guns-and -romance spree where Guizar Saab's poetry slyly meets Ranveer Singh's buffoonery. Half-way through the narration you realise director Shaad Ali has run out of designer cool tricks

Enough of those chic shots of our two heroes riding down busy highways gunning for unsuspecting victims Yes, our heroes Dev and Tutu are assassins. You could've fooled me! They look like a couple of petty pick-pockets But God and the screenwriters (three of them, actually what's that they say about too many crooks sorry, cooks?) have l ofti er plans for our heroes who eat, laugh, cry and kill together But never sleep together

The heroes are assigned boarding school double- decker beds, just so that we don't get any homosexual ideas Th i s is Jai and Vee r u from Sho/ay without Jai clambering on Veeru's shoulder on the motorbike. They sing together but the lyrics are about assassinati on and jubilation Yash Raj films went into similar turbulent territory of dosti versus love in the recent Gunday I have to admit Kill Di/ i s a smaller disaster than Gunday.

Ranveer, who played one of the two buddies in the earlier film as well, i s far more entertaining here He's still way over th e to p. But here h e is h ammy in a pleasa n t way.

Trouble starts and the ki llin g s fo r hi m end when Ranveer's character Dev falls in love with the neighbourhood femme fatale, a weirdly freelancing heiress played by the forcibly glammed-up Par ineeti Chopra, who seems to have her hands in every single pie that she can lay her manicured fingers on

Just what she sees in the ruffian Dev is something only the scriptwriter can answer. The romance which over takes the Ranveer-A l i Zafar bromance is among the many inexplicable mysteries that squeeze and smother the life out of this trite -and-teste d action-comedy masquerading as Tarantino's distant cousin

Another mystery: why does Guizar Saab's voice - over show up in three places to remind us that violence be g et s o n ly violen ce? Why bring t he man of such indomitable refinement into a film that ree ks of r aw rancidity? And why the songs? Good l ord, they burst out of the narrative's seams l ike a fat man's paun ch in a shirt several sizes too smal l for him.

Undoubtedly some of the purportedly funny situations h it the mark. When Dev falls i n love and refo r ms from a hit-man to an i n surance agent, his ca ll er tune changes from Pankaj Udhas's 'Chitti ayee hai' to Lataji's ' Ra henna rahen hum'

The characters, includ i ng the supposed l y sinister villain Bhaiji, break into dance without a ca r e about who's watc h ing I can un d erstand the scri pt's eagerness to make the villain dance as he's played by Govinda The actor par excellence is not only back in form here, he imbues his u ni-dimensional part with unexpected humour and charm.

Welcome back, Govinda Wish we could say t h e same about the director.

Is this the same filmmaker who once made the endearing Bunty Aur Babli? Shaad Ali brings down with him some of our very best techn i cians l i ke cinematographer Aveek Mukhopadhyay and ed itor Ritesh Soni who have done their most p atchy work in this fi l m His first fi l m in seven years, and this is what Shaad comes up with?

SUBHASH K. JHA