AN AGONISING SHTICK

the serious issue of environmental pollution.

Apartfrom this, the film is replete with tell-and-show expositions, halfbakedcharacters, plot holes galore and interplanetary fight sequences.

TigerShroff in the titular role is sincere and charming. With a stubble andturban he is striking and he lights upthe screen with his presence. His character is designed like a satire and he excels in its caricature, but the poorly scripteddrama does not back him enough.

Jacqueline Fernandez, in a relatively small role, is competent as Aman's love interest, the giggly headed Kriti.

She looks radiant, performs ably and matches Tiger in histrionics. But she fails to be consistent in the accent. Her dialoguedeliveryfluctuatesfrom an anglicised accent to a local one.

The hulk Nathan Jones plays the stereotypical henchman with aplomb and elevates the characterto the rank of an antagonist. Kay Kay Menon as the pivotal bad man essays his role in a hackneyed manner.

The two characters who make their presence feltare AmritaSingh, as the drunk Mrs. Dhillon, andthe character who playsRohit - Aman's friend, accomplice and brother-figure. Technically, the film boasts of ace production values, but the spirit is diluted with poor craftsmanship. The effects are not at parwith international standards andthough the computer generated images mesh seamlessly into the live action, the finesse is missing.

The songs are well choreographed and well picturised except forthe Beat pe booty. This one seems forced and poorly mounted in a studio environment. Overall, the directorseems to have lost the plot afterthe second act, as the narrative meanders making the entire comic affair agonising.

TroyRibeiro

AKIRA

STARRING:SSonakshiSinha, Anurag

Kashyap, Konkona SenSharma

DIRECTOR: A R Murugadoss ..'< ',, .

The biggest takeaway from this brutal depiction of police atrocity is the cop Rane.As played by Anurag Kashyap, the character acquires sharp spiky edges that pierce the plot and penetrate into a region far deeper than where director Murugadoss rests his case.

Don't get him wrong. Murugadoss means well. Akira takes up the cause of women's empowerment, but only on a superficial level. When Akira is still a child (which is to say, she is played bylittle Mishiekka Arora) she takes revenge on an acid thrower by, well, learning karate (prompted by her inspiring mute dad) and throwing acid back on the guy who did it.

So there!

As simple asthat. If only life was as uncomplicated. As though to make up for the paucity of clutter and plain substantiality in the first half, Akira suffers a severe midlife crisis and goes into spasms oftortuoustorture scenes meant to show Akira reaching breaking point before she explodes.

Instead ofSonakshi's Akira exploding on screen, the plot crumbles and falls apart under the weight of the gross violence. Murugadoss excels at showing hisfemale protagonists being brutalised. Iron rods are a favourite weapon to torture subjugate andalmostlobotomise spirited women.In Ghajini, Asin was bludgeoned to deathbecauseshe was too sunshiny for the villain to bear

In Akira,Sonakshi sulks ceaselessly (troubled childhood, super-troubled adulthood), until the villainous cop and his hysterical deputies, accomplices in law-sanctioned crime (one of whom at one point falls to the ground whimpering as Kashyaplooks alarmed and I embarrassed),take her out to a forest J anddecideto eliminate her because well, r they gotthe wronggirl. '

Ditto the film. It got the right girlSonakshi is sufficiently restrained and implosive - but it put her in impossibly sadistic situations. The scenes of her torture in a mental asylum, run by a doctor who looks like a pimp at a run-down brothel, are prolonged and unnecessary. If only the narrative, so gripping to begin with, had not grown fabby as it progressed.

Kashyap's diabolic cop's performance holds the film together. He had played a dirty lawman in his own film Ugly. He builds on the earlier cop role and hones the art oflawlessnessto such an extent that we miss him whenever he isn't around in this film. Sadly, the actors playing his khaki-wearing colleagues emerge as caricatures of desperate criminality.You can take Murugadoss out of the South, but you can't take the South out of him.

The other very interesting character is that of a righteous pregnant cop Rabia, playedlaconically by Konkona Sen Sharma. She imparts a sort of stubborn idealismto hercharacter,compounded by her heavily immobile state.Tragically her slow painful physical movement becomes a metaphor for the plodding righteousness of the script.

Though well-intended,Akira tends to slow down its own virtuous journey with implausible roadblocks, including a mentally-disturbed eunuch who helps Akira escape from the mental asylum where the villains lock her away while her family looks the other way. Oh yes, there is a sympathetic lover played by AmitSadh who looks on helplessly as the villains wreak hectic havoc on the heroine.

To mend the holes in the plot, Murugadoss stuffs the storytelling with messages on the physically and mentally disabled and on police brutality. While the sermons don't get shrillthe smothered cries of 'Enough!' can be heard from miles away.

That's usscreaming in protest, as Sonakshi Sinha tries bravely to make her tortured character braver than what the story writers allow her to be.Akira is a film thatcould have gone very far, if only the theme of women's empowerment hadnot been overpowered by the Murugadoss school of villainous barbarism which does not discriminate between man and woman. Is that what the neo-feminists mean by equality of the sexes?

Subhash K. Jha