Film: Red – The Dark Side
Director: Vikram Bhatt
Cast: Aftab Shivdasani, Celina Jaitley, Amrita Arora and Sushant Singh
Rating: 1/5
Red is what you get when you have a mid sized budget and choose to sign two actors who refuse to act and one who can’t.
Red – The Dark Side is all dark and honestly has no side whatsoever to it. Initially when the movie commences you are actually led to believe that it might just turn out to be interesting. With cuts between time and well captured moments it’s all too good to be true. What follows lets you down hard and fast.
If you sat to see the first 10 minutes of the film you will have figured out the plot for yourself. The moment Celina’s character is introduced you realize that she is playing games. There is so much happening in the movie that your mind is tossing around. There is no thrill or even an ounce of surprise when the end is revealed.
It’s a typical mad wife kills her husband and has the facts twisted to escape trial movie.
Neil (Aftan) is the recipient of the heart that once belonged to Anahita’s (Celina) husband. He insists on meeting the donor’s wife and at first glance falls in love with her. Little miss no good has him dancing to her tunes and leads him to believe that her husband was murdered by none other than Riah (Amrita Arora), who subsequently is her best friend. So off goes the knight to seek revenge for his lady love’s lost husband. What is expected to come as a surprise is the fact that, miss no good, Anahita is actually the culprit (As if we did not know!!).
The whole reason of watching a thriller is for the fact that you are thrilled and are on the edge of your seat. With Red you find yourself sharing a bucket of popcorn and throwing it all around out of boredom.
With corny dialogues the movie is a bummer. The highlight dialogues of the movie would have to be those like “You have not only given me my life, you have also given me a reason to live,†or an even more corny one was Celina saying “You used me in bed, I used you out of it.â€ÂÂ
With shoddy dialogues like these you are left laughing. Undoubtedly the icing on the cake was the final dialogue by Aftab in which he tells Amrita, “I’m ready to die in love, I’m ready to kill in love but I am not ready to be a fool in love.†This leads you to believe the film was never meant to be an intellectual thriller intended to keep you hooked on.
The camera work is so-so but what is yet another letdown is the fact that the whole movie looks dull and as though the colour was drained out from it. The red looks dull (please don’t try to take this as symbolism for something) and all the night shots look heavily corrected.
If it was not for Himesh’s songs the movie would not have much to offer whatsoever. This film is yet another one in the line of no good films provided by the director. With hit films like Raaz, Kasoor, Awaara Pagal Deewana in the past, Vikram Bhatt’s Red is a miss by a long shot.
The actors fail to make an impression. Aftab who seems to fit the part, fails to deliver it. Celina and Amrita seem as though they have decided not to act whatsoever throughout this film. So what you see is their act of not wanting to act. The only laudable performance is that by Sushant Singh essaying the role of the inspector assigned to investigate the case, he does it with much ease.
Red can be expected to do a below average business since it the script lacks by leaps and bounds and there is no grip whatsoever in the plot. What could have possibly been a great thriller, manages to be a huge let-down.
