Film: “Blood Money”Starring: Kunal Kemmu, Amrita Puri, Manish Chaoudhary, Sunil SickandDirector: Vishal MahadkarRating: 
It would take the Bhatts, those grand-masters of morality tales, a long time to live down this one. Clotted with cliches and cluttured with trite situations straight out of the Bhatts’ earlier impressive oeuvre, “Blood Money” dives right into a cesspool of predictable characters who we all know are heading nowhere.And we couldn’t care less.
Debutant director Vishal Mahadkar seems to vacillate between high-anxiety and laziness. He lets the plot hang loose on the most necessary junctures prompting us to wonder whether the director lost interest, similar to we do after a point.
There are seeds of a fascinating morality tale here. A bright-eyed eager-to-succeed MBA from India arrives in Cape Town along with his equally wide-eyed wife.They soak up the grand lifestyle with squeals and gasps that kindergarten children would recognise after they visit the zoo for the primary time.
The scenic location is shot with a type of inert aloofness that involves the camera when it knows it’s shooting a no-go.
Once in Cape Town, the administrators simply flops all the way down to a type of cinematic siesta from which the narrative seldom wakes up. Plodding through a chain of long-winded images denoting the protagonist’s (Kunal Khemu) descent right into a diamond-studded hell, we're left with a movie that has an excessive amount of to say, and doesn’t say it well enough to carry our interest.
At the outset, Khemu’s idealistic wife(Amrita Puri) tells us their posh mansion reminds her of the chocolate-coated home in Hansel & Gretel. Before could chew on that one, the director moves to an elaborate sequence in an Italian restaurant where, vis-à-vis Khemu’s growing awareness of the “money trap” laid down by his bosses, his boss snarls, “So you need to taste the dish or investigate what’s happening within the kitchen?”
We really don’t know what’s gone into the slow-cooking plot of “Blood Money”. The screenwriters appear to have selected piling at the predictable without a respite in sight. The songs credited to four composers come on with a desperate intensity that fails to provoke us in regards to the film’s noble intentions.
“Blood Money” purports to be an attention-grabbing soul-piercing tackle misguided ambition, degeneration and redemption. Nevertheless it fails to generate any roughly original perception at the subject. Worse, there are sure signs of laziness within the storytelling where the unique intention of making a way of foreboding and suspense within the hero’s morally challenged world, falls apart leaving gaping holes within the narration.
The film talks of maladies and aberrations in a multi-billion corporate house. But on screen, all we see is one snarling tycoon and his hyper-ventilating brother whose sophisticated-goons’ acts are as intimidating as two amateur guys seeking to delay a bank with a toy gun.
Khemmu tries his utmost to inject earnestness into his bland role. He fights off the cliches to come back up with some heart-melting emotional moments.But he can’t really delay a movie that sags like an over-the-hill diva’s face-lifted glamour.
Puri as Khemu’s wife succumbs to the vast legacy of dejà vu that her role carries. From Mumtaz in Vijay Anand’s “Tere Mere Sapne” to Sonal Chauhan in Kunal Deshmukh’s “Jannat”, leading ladies have forever watched their husbands lose their moral ground without a hope of redemption. Puri is far back within the queue.
“Blood Money” suffers from a significant deluge of monotonous scenes where the actors speak their line as if in a radio play. We hear them loud and clear. But we fail to empathize with the cleverness that the dialogue tries to succeed in in scattered showers.
By the time Khemu’s character takes that tumble within the hay at the office desk with the office whore, we all know the film and its main character are doomed.
Salvation on this film is that exit door which we rush to when the end-credits roll.
Provided we last that long. – IANS
Advertisement:
