Knock Out

This one is an out and out cut copy paste job of Phone Booth (Colin Farrel). Just a change of language to Hinglish. Irrfan (no longer Khan) is Tony a.k.a Bachchu, a middleman in high value political dealings going into thousands of crores of tax payer’s money. He is the guy who knows how much of the money is in which bank account for a leading politican called Bapuji (Gulshan Grover). He lives with his wife (Rukhsar) and daughter in Mumbai. He treats women with absolute disdain and uses them as toys and has several extra marital affairs. His wife, however, thinks he is the best husband possible.

Sanjay Dutt is a common man who decides the take things into his own hands. He works alone but has access to the best available technology – stuff that only people @ very high levels in the services would have access to. One fine morning, Bachchu is at his favourite PCO (u CANNOT use mobile phones if u are such a high profile pimp). What he doesn’t know is that he is being watched / stalked by Sanjay Dutt at the same time. He takes his list of drop off points for the day and is about to leave when the phone rings. Against better sense, he decides the pick up the call and quickly finds out that he is trapped inside the booth. At least till his stalker decides otherwise. When a druggie decides to harass Bachchu for some money he was to pick up, he gets shot in broad day light.

A crowd slowly starts building up, followed by the cops led by the officer in charge (Sushant Singh) and his sidekick. It is only a matter of time before the media also arrives led by Nidhi (Kangana Ranaut) who is a correspondent for India TV. And a smart correspondent at that. She takes long range shots of the area, especially the phone booth much before the crowd becomes uncontrollable. Starts putting 2 and 2 together and figures out that there is a stalker. What does she do? Like any other responsible media person goes both to the cops and her boss. She is attractive enough to make a Mumbai Cop drool and dim witted enough to believe that she will get the first rights to everything that happens around the area.

The drama then slowly begins to unfold into what can be described as a mini laugh riot. It is appalling to see the bad bad bad execution of a very good original. The direction is Tacky. Mani Shankar it would seem hasn’t learnt much from his earlier experiences which were equal disasters. The execution is all over the place. Editing – almost non existant. Consistency – out of the window. Effects – looks pasted. Green Screens – again non existant. Sanjay Dutt and Irrfan continue to perform in any movie to the best of their abilities. Although Irrfan could have done with a proper hair cut. Kangana is sincere to the core. She is definitely good looking – I am increasingly beginning to believe that since Once upon a time in Mumbai. But her dialogue delivery totally sucks. She says everything with an emphasis on every single word like a class 4 student would do in her first elocution competition. Cant quite say anyone else existed. Quite a badly made movie – not surprisingly – 3 on 10.