Oof… I’ve seen a handful of Indian pictures imported to the US over the past few years and this one didn’t work for me at all… though perhaps more exposure to these actors and this director would have had made me appreciate it more.

The film is about a crew of rabble rousers… political activists… terrorists who are kicking it to political corruption. A hostage negotiator unknowingly falls in with the leader of this group and all sorts of shenanigans, double-crosses, and reveals ensue.

This flick has everything a Bollywood film needs. It’s got the requisite hyper action, the requisite romance, the requisite song and dance numbers, the requisite slow-mo, and the requisite cool. It’s got WAY too much cool… so much slow-mo cool that its holding a sign up pointing to how cool it is. It so much cool it gets in the way of itself.

I had zero interest in the plot or characters underneath all the shiny, shiny glitz and that’s deadly for an almost three hour action film. I was bored and sometimes perplexed at the plot twists and where it was going. The action scenes are well performed, the camera catches everything (due to the excessive slow-mo), and none of it mattered because I didn’t care.

And then it drops a Very Special Message directly to the camera… and it’s a good message. I’m on its side… but it’s so blunt that I wound up rolling my eyes. On the plus side, it’s a general enough message to work internationally so you don’t need to know Indian politics to understand the lecture.

This flick wants so desperately to entertain that it went all the way around and bored me. It’s cool to be cool but maybe not at the expense of everything else. That said, if you don’t have my action film hang-ups, you might get into this flick where I could not. Wouldn’t be the first action flick that left me cold but wowed everyone else. My indifference probably doesn’t amount to a hill of beans.

Score: 70