Blood Money

Mahesh Bhatt follows a very simple formula with his movies. There was a time that he was the keen producer director who looked at making serious cinema. But he was quick to learn that Bollywood is anything but the arty farty types. At the end of the day, it is the cash registers in the Box Office that determine success and therefore it is important to strike a balance between quality of cinema and commercial viability. That saw the movement of Shri Bhatt from producer director to just producer after Kartoos (1999). The rest as they say is history. Over the past 13 years I cannot remember the last time a Mahesh Bhatt movie flopped.

Blood Money is no different. A simple formula based movie. Take a couple of young actors and give them reasonable roles in a story that is again quite reasonable but filled with clichés. Kunal Kadam (Kunal Khemu) and Arzoo (Amrita Puri) are a newly married couple who have come from a supremely middle class background. In fact Kunal has worked his way up from the streets to complete an MBA (god such a cliché) and finds himself in his dream job (another cliché) in Mahesh Bhatts favourite location – South Africa (cliché 3).

His dream job is with an Indian diamond tycoon Dharmesh Zaveri (Manish Chaudhary) who is actually a presumed to be dead terrorist – Rajan Zakaria. Needless to say, the trail leads to blood diamonds and terrorism across the globe but Kunal is in too deep before he realizes his folly. Now he has to find his way out of it else he meets a gory death like all who have tried to get out of the spider’s web.

Blood Money is filled with the corniest of dialogues such as, “Mujhe yahaan se vidhwa banke nahin jaana hai Kunal” (I do not want to leave South Africa a widow) to call one out. In fact the weakest point of the movie is the screenplay and dialogues. Writers Sanjay Masoom & Upendra Sidhaye sure have a long way to go in the script writing business. Some decent music from Jeet Ganguly, Siddharth Ganguly & Sangeet Haldipur is the better part of the movie – like most movies from Mahesh Bhatt.

On the performance part, Kunal Khemu is decent as always. I have always believed that he is capable of much more but no clue to what is holding him back. Amrita Puri doesn’t quite carry over her good performance from Aisha where she was the highlight of the movie. She is good here but at places quite over the top. Needs to move over to a more serious role that just of a simple girl. Manish Chaudhary is the highlight of Blood Money by far with a very solid performance.

On the whole, Blood Money is a decent one time watch. Not necessarily on the big screen though. nothing that you would not have seen before but not bad at all. I was hoping for a 5+ score when I walked in and I got exactly that. 5.5 on 10.

Watch the trailer at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uK2cdBzl8qg