THE XPOSE: One of the cheesiest suspense thrillers, aka unintentional comedy!! [2/5]

Fans who have had regular access to gossipy magazines like ‘Mayapuri’ and ‘Stardust’ would agree more that bollywood film industry has always been blessed with cheesy, salty and spicy ‘inside’ news pieces on link-ups, break-ups, regular tiffs between stars, catfights in parties and rivalries that run longer than the film on box-office. Now, if someone from those unsighted admirers would have made a film like ‘THE XPOSE’ taking references from here and there, it would have been easily an ignorable offence…but coming from Ananth Narayan Mahadevan, a veteran himself from the industry, it is a shameful cold-blooded crime to present all of it in a hasty, half-baked and horrifically bad light.

THE XPOSE, set in glamorously stylish 60’s, is a fictional memoir inspired by real life incidents happened in bollywood. So you have a moody, egoistic and bigmouthed superstar Ravi Kumar [Played by who else? The Himesh Reshammiya], a character modeled on yesteryear Actor Rajkumar famous for his attitude and many regular interferences on set suitable to his self-proclaimed image. How can you not find the connection when he compliments one of his co-stars on her dress that he could use the same for his house as curtains??

Then, there are a couple of sex-symbols who catfights in parties and bears strong resemblance from real-life contemporaries Zeenat Aman & Parveen Bobby. There is also a top music director KD [India’s latest sensation Yo Yo Honey Singh playing someone like RD Burman] who can sell the same tune to two different filmmakers. If you could do an elephant-eyed examination, you will also find visible suggestions of Sunil Dutt saving Nargis’s life from a fire mishap on set, a publishing house giant replicating Nari Hira of Stardust and hidden interest of underworld in the business. All that and an unfortunate death of a leading actress [Divya Bharti?? Who knows!!]! Everyone is under scanner and the frisky & frolicky fiction takes over the touch of reality!

THE XPOSE is stylish and sensational but cheaply designed, undeveloped ‘insider’s view’ to encash people’s thirst for scandalous ‘behind the curtain’ news. It gets easier if you already in sync with those intimations and indications before hand in order to relate and rejoice but as an outsider, you will always miss the punch here. Watching Himesh delivering lines like, “Main jo bol deta hoon, wohi script ho jaati hai” and “Style pe aap kaam karo, attitude pe maine bachpan se kaam kiya hai” makes you giggle and chuckle at the first but soon you will feel the juice getting either too sweet or too salty to enjoy. Baby-faced Yo Yo Honey Singh looks fresh for the screen and bearable when lip-syncing his own songs. Newcomers Sonali Raut and Zoya Afroz do it as been told and predicted. Adil Hussain brings some credibility in his shorter but smarter performance. By the way, the story gets narrated by Irrfan Khan playing a blackmarketeer at cinema-halls. No explanations would be enough to understand why this special appearance??

With nasal-toned singing, ‘ice-dream khaoongi, Kashmir jaoongi’ kind of inanity in lyrics, average performance, distasteful writing and a suspense that falls more in the grid of unplanned-unintentional-accidental comedy, THE XPOSE is one of the cheesiest suspense thriller that can be watchable if you are allowed to make loud comments on its idiocy in theatre. It’s the only way out to relieve yourself of the load it throws on your intellect. Sadly, multiplex culture doesn’t pursue that any longer! So, better leave it for a home-viewing! [2/5]      

STATION: …deserves a watch for the freshness it brings to Bollywood crime-thrillers! [3/5]

In midst of this week’s more than a couple of bogus Bollywood A-listers, there is a small film [in budget for sure] titled as ‘STATION’ getting unnoticed by most of us. So, when I reached at the box-office at the nearest PVR multiplex in Delhi-NCR, least I had expected to hear that the show got cancelled as it’s just me who had shown some guts to go for it. Anyways; thanks to the collective love for cinema, the guys at the box-office decided to run it despite me being the only one in the auditorium. And now that I have seen it, I would like to proclaim that this small one is bigger than the rest 3 new releases from Bollywood this week.  

Saad Khan’s STATION is the first Bollywood film that comes from Bangalore. A crime-thriller in its genre; it smells fresh, clean, crisp, mature, confident and quite a fine piece of film-making for so many newcomers involved in it. Though unlike most of indie filmmakers, it doesn’t prefer to be smarter than the smartest to grab attentions from left, right and centre of the industry and opts for a safe and sound route to tell a ‘perfect for Bollywood’ tale of plotting, betrayals, dark secrets, murders in the power hungry immoral world of crime.

Introduced by the badman of Bollywood Gulshan Grover, STATION puts you in the colonnade of a crime syndicate run by a formally dressed, soft-spoken King in frameless pair of glasses. The associates too are symbolically introduced as the facets in any playing-card pack. There is a loyal Queen, a hardcore Madhuri Dixit fan but murderous Joker who loves to joke even in a heated scenario, a cool-headed Jack with balanced mind as the right hand to the king and a game-changer Ace who talks to his dead girlfriend in his state of hallucination after getting drugged. The game on the board turns upside down when the King gets killed. And now the Queen has taken the charge to solve the mystery and punish the responsible! The plan must be executed by the rest three and then starts the mind games that doesn’t make you breathe in regular motion till you come to see the clearer picture of why, how and who.

Film’s biggest strength is undoubtedly the background score. Music by Jeet Singh celebrates the western elements in singing and in the composition to give it a young contemporary urban touch. The narrative pattern scatters the plot and the events at first and then tries to solve the puzzle by putting pieces together. Sharp, crisp and confident editing! Cinematography is absolutely appropriate for the genre. Performers are mostly newcomers and it looks. Though they act raw, conscious and amateurish sometimes, it is not much difficult to ignore as Saad sure knows his craft well to tell a story as it should be.

STATION is not some extraordinary thriller but it is not just any ordinary thriller too. It is a Bollywood film that doesn’t actually come from Bollywood.  It deserves a watch for the freshness it brings to the Bollywood crime-thrillers! [3/5]