Movie Review: Prince. [Should’ve been called Farce!]

I needed a reboot myself after returning from the screening of Prince, where the hero faces from acute bouts of nausea and passes out coz his “brain crashes every time he reboots i.e. sleeps”! And no, I’m not making this up here…its actually the whole bedrock principle of the movie *facepalm*

The hero, is called only Prince for no apparent reason (its *not* his nickname…they actually show an ID Card with the name as Prince Verma!) and is said to be a master thief – though he only vacuums up some diamonds at the start of the movie and ransacks a telephone booth at the fag end & steals nothing in between! Something lame happens to his memory and he recalls only the past day or so.

Therein starts a whole rigmarole where the hapless audience is subjected to not one, not two but three bimbos calling themselves Maya, an idiotic servant who keeps repeating “woh” every time he opens his mouth, some wierdly named organizations – there’s DCOI & IGRIP, for starters, a ‘look-ma-I’ve-a-Terminator-esque-hand’ villain, umpteen gun-toting phoren extras, some unfathomable computer gadgetry and a whole lot of bunkum. And yeah, there’re several quite daring but nonsensical stunts – most of them involving jumping off rooftops on bikes!

Amidst all this hoopla, there’s nothing resembling a storyline or a screenplay. Yeah, there’s a flashback story that is a load of tripe, some mumbo-jumbo about national security, the usual hundreds of millions of dollars at stake and also the backstabbery but all of them are as predictable as tomorrow’s sunrise! Logic, rationale, flow and meaning disappear as the horns did off a donkey’s head!

Vivek Oberoi tries his damned best to “act” and instil some life into a dying movie but there’s only so much he can do. The three ladies are there for (a) Item song & greed display [Neeru Singh]; (b) Cleavage & tattoo show-off and backstabbery [Nandana Sen]; and (c) Skin show, song partnering & just coz there has to be someone who can be called the heroine [Aruna Shields]. The main bad guy [Isaiah] runs the risk of being laughed at at his terminator-esqe robotic claw for a hand and no amount of name-chanting-in-the-background can make him seem evil. Dalip Tahil  takes his role rather too seriously as some Colonel heading a Government unit called IGRIP (Indian Government Research Intelligence Police/Protocol ???) and though Sanjay Kapoor as CBI Officer Khan maintains a poker face throughout, the fact that he narrates the absurdity of a flashback doesn’t endear him too much to the audience.

What did you say? Music’s Good? Pooh! If the ad-lib repetition of Oh Mere Khuda and Tere Liye by the always-sounding-the-same Atif Aslam sounded “good” to you, you need help. And for the boys, there are no cool toys or gizmos either to drool at. well, there’re the three babes but neither are not worth a second glance, leave alone a drool!

The director is clearly inspired from several Hollywood movies – The Bourne Series & The 6th Day spring to mind immediately (not counting Dhoom 2) and maybe if he based the movie in the year 3090 and not used lame-ass explanations for the loss of memory (I personally thought the Syncording concept from The 6th Day as quite plausible!), asked action director Allan Amin not to dream up impossible stunts and diverted part of the funds from the phoren goons into paying the script-writer, maybe, just maybe, the movie wouldn’t have turned into the Farce that it ended up as!

I wish there was a way to “erase” this movie’s remembrance from my memory! 😐

Moi Rating:  (Only coz I didn’t have a 0 star image!)

P.S: There’s the slight possibility that the makers might conjure up a *shudder* sequel! You’ve been warned!