Movie Reviews: Red- The Dark Side

Please post all reviews for the movie Red-The dark side😊

By Taran Adarsh, March 9, 2007 - 12:07 IST

Never judge a book by its cover. That holds true for films as well. A stylish promo or a fascinating billboard could raise your expectations and compel you to rush to a nearby movieplex to watch the film. But, alas! All that glitters is not gold.

RED – THE DARK SIDE has generated tremendous hype over the weeks due to its eye-catching promotional teasers. Unfortunately, watching the film is akin to flying in an aircraft that's run out of fuel midway. It starts off well, you are hooked to the goings-on, the game begins… But the fizz settles down sooner than expected.

What's wrong with RED – THE DARK SIDE? Plenty of things! Most importantly, the writing [story-screenplay: Manoj Tyagi] is outright tacky. It vacillates between komsi-komsa to amateurish to confused.

But the reason why RED – THE DARK SIDE falls like a pack of cards is because you know that the lady is playing games. You know that she has a hidden agenda. You know that she's out to use Mr. Millionaire. You realize all this because you've witnessed similar themes in the past.

So when the cat is out of the bag, you aren't shocked. On the contrary, you break into a big yawn. Also, the way the writer rushes up things -- demystifying the shadyantra -- you wonder if he knows the basics of screenplay writing. The climax is the lifeline of any thriller, but in RED – THE DARK SIDE, the culmination to the story acts as a spoilsport.

Write your own movie review of Red: The Dark Side

Vikram Bhatt has attempted several thrillers in the past. Films like KASOOR and RAAZ and even JURM [in parts] were in a different league altogether. But RED – THE DARK SIDE is his weakest product so far. Sure, the film is stylishly shot, but style can never substitute for substance.

To cut a long story short, RED – THE DARK SIDE disappoints!

Neel [Aftab Shivdasani] is a billionaire. Diagnosed with a fatal heart ailment, Neel's life comes to a screeching halt. Only a miracle [heart transplant] can save him. As luck would have it, the doctor [Kishori Shahane Vij] gets a donor. It's Anahita's [Celina Jaitley] husband, who has died in a road accident.

Anahita is a gorgeous lady. After her husband's demise, she leads a lonely life. Neel is drawn into a passionate affair with Anahita. Suddenly, things take a turn…

Anahita informs Neel that her husband had been murdered. And Ria [Amrita Arora], Anahita's best friend, is the culprit. She had an affair with Anahita's husband and since she couldn't marry him, she decided to eliminate him instead.

Neel murders Ria's friend Rocky [Amin Hajee], who had murdered Anahita's husband. But Neel loses his watch while committing the gruesome act. The investigation begins and the cop [Sushant Singh] is on the trail of those who had committed the heinous act.

Anahita now wants Ria out of her way. Neel is ready to commit the second murder…

Certain stories sound interesting on paper, but run out of steam as the reels unfold. RED – THE DARK SIDE shows promise as it takes off. The characters are well established at the very outset. Everything is going fine. Suddenly, the writer applies brakes. It gets into a predictable mode. Everything that happens thereafter only takes the graph of the film down.

Thrillers work for one vital reason. The moviegoer shouldn't be able to guess the identity/motive of the killer till the penultimate reel. In this case, you know that someone's playing games. The lead man doesn't know, but the viewer senses it and that's why the film falls off the cliff.

The climax is so silly, so juvenile that you actually want to ask Vikram Bhatt, how did he okay this kind of inept writing in the first place?

Vikram Bhatt tries hard to keep the show going, but the substandard writing proves a roadblock. Himesh Reshammiya's music is interesting, but not at par with his earlier works. Without doubt, 'Aafreen' is the pick of the lot. The lip-locks in a couple of songs make the tracks appear steamy. Pravin Bhatt's cinematography is eye-catching. The lighting deserves special mention.

RED – THE DARK SIDE belongs to Aftab Shivdasani, who's matured into a dependable actor. Looking suave in formals, the actor has also worked on his physique by shedding unwanted fat. He handles his part extremely well. Celina Jaitley is better than her previous films. She looks alluring and plays a calculating woman with conviction, except for one particular sequence when she makes a call to Aftab from a phone booth.

Amrita Arora has no role whatsoever. She's hardly there. Hello Ms. Arora, what did you see in this role? Sushant Singh is the atypical cop we've watched in hundreds of Hindi movies before. Kishori Shahane Vij and Amin Hajee are alright.

On the whole, RED – THE DARK SIDE stands on a weak script. At the box-office, it stands no chance!

I knew aftab is going to steal the show like he did in movie kasoor 😊

Sounds like a real boring movie 2 me, thx 4 warning. 😕

REDIFF REVIEW OF RED

The film will make you see Red

Komal Mehta | March 09, 2007 14:42 IS

The movie starts okay.

Neil Oberoi (Aftab Shivdasani) is a dying man in urgent need of a heart transplant -- his has got a hole. Yeah, the transplant thing is a bit of a stretch, but wait, it just gets worse.

So anyway, Neil is cured when a donor finally turns up. So far so good.

Then Neil decides to find the identity of the donor in order to thank the family. Well, nothing wrong with that.

It's just when the doctor unethically reveals the name that the movie begins to spiral down.

Neil finds out that his heart donor is a certain Anuj Saxena (a non-entity in the movie), survived by his wife. Neil then predictably falls in love with the widow.

Ok, so it's now a love story where the guy falls in love with the widow of his organ donor and she falls in love with him but doesn't know until the end, right?

Wrong.

Thankfully, though that angle gets resolved in the next 10 minutes, when Anahita (Celina Jaitley) confronts Neil when she realises he's stalking her. In his defense, Neil meekly says 'Main woh admi Hun jise Anuj ka dil mila.' ('I'm the man who got Anuj's heart.) Yes, that lame.

What follows is the so called 'dark side of love,' just vaguely connected to the first half of the movie -- making you wonder why the organ donation part was put in the movie in the first place. The rest of the movie is plain Sex. Murder. Sex. A Song. Police. More Sex. Then more Murder.

That's about it. There are no surprises.

A still from RedVikram Bhatt's attempt at a different style of narrative and cinematography fails to deliver and ends up being cheesy. Water is a constant in all the scenes, and there is just too much play of shadows, lights and the colour red.

As for the performances, the less said the better. Physically Aftab looks good but the same cannot be said of his role, which is half formed and very one-dimensional. It's the same for the actresses, Celina Jaitley and Amrita Arora. Woody performances and over the top hysterical screaming matches is about all we see from the girls. There is no chemistry between the lead characters.

Normally, Bhatt movies have a good musical score that makes an otherwise mediocre movie bearable. But here too, the music is dismal. Out of all the songs by Himesh Reshamiya, Ameen is the only one that can be recalled.

Altogether a mediocre attempt with nothing but hot scenes to reel the view in. Give this one a miss.

Rediff rating:*

Red review
Friday, March 09, 2007 07:55:03 pm

Film: Red

Cast: Aftaab Shivdasani, Celina Jaitley, Amrita Arora, Sushant Singh

Director: Vikram Bhatt

Rating: (Yawn)

Let's cut to the chase. Vikram Bhatt's Red is an assault, an atrocity and you should only watch it, if you want to laugh hysterically. No, it is not a comedy, it is just painfully and unintentionally comical - in case you missed the publicity, this is Bhatt's attempt at a European style noir thriller. Whatever!

Anyway, the story is about a heaving panting Celina Jaitley whose husband dies in a road accident. His heart is donated to a billionaire, Aftaab who tracks down Celina to express his gratitude, ends up expressing a lot more. Much heavy breathing and steam later, he finds that Celina suspects her best friend Amrita Arora may have something to with her husband's death - and may now be gunning for her. Literally!

To call Red pedestrian would be to compliment it. This is a dreadful mish mash of films like '21 Grams' and 'Double Indemnity'. In the cast, Aftaab tries hard to look convincing, Celina needs to be told that heavy breathing is not substitute for acting and Amrita Arora - well, never mind!! Needless to say, don't go near this film - even the smut and sleaze quotient is not up to the mark!!

(Reviewed by Naomi Datta. For more, tune in to E NOW Weekend, Saturday 9:30 pm & Sunday 5:30 pm)

http://www.timesnow.tv/Red_review/articleshow/1742278.cms

Review: Red Red-undant

Cast: Aftab Shivdasani, Celina Jaitley, Amrita Arora, Kishori Shahane, Sushant Singh
Director: Vikram Bhatt

Synopsis: Aftab undergoes a heart transplant operation and tries to find the donor. His doctor (Kishori Shahane) tells him the identity of the donor after his repeated requests. Celina is the lonely wife of the donor and Aftab gets attracted to her. He follows her and later knows that her husband is murdered and now her life is in danger too.

Acting: Aftab has acted very well but Celina irritates for almost the entire movie. Amrita Arora hardly has any role while Sushant Singh is good.

Direction: Red is a typical Vikram Bhatt movie. The pace is very slow and bores you to death. It offers nothing new. In short, the film has no novelty value.

indya.com rating: 1 out of 5

Script: Red is inspired by one of the stories of the Hollywood flick 21 Grams. The story can be predicted in the first 15 minutes itself.

indya.com rating: 1 out of 5

Music: There's nothing new about Himesh Reshammiya's music. All the songs sound the same. What's more, even the picturisation of all songs are similar, with Aftab and Celina engrossed in intimacy.

indya.com rating: 1 out of 5
cinemaa.indya.com

Hues of murder
Indu Mirani
Friday, March 09, 2007 22:03 IST

Red - The Dark Side
Direction: Vikram Bhatt
Cast: Aftab Shivdasani, Celina Jaitley, Amrita Arora
Rating: *

Why is this film called Red - The Dark Side? Doesn't that make it maroon? Or do they mean the dark side of the moon, famously reputed for turning people cuckoo?

That might be more likely; everyone in this film is bananas.

There's this guy (Aftab Shivdasani) who has got a brand new heart and decides to say thank you to the widow (Celina Jaitley) of the man whose heart it was. Except that he doesn't, he stalks her instead.

When he does get around to saying thanks, it's long and eventful, which ends with him falling in love with her and going through several smooch and sleep sessions.

Hamming like there was no tomorrow, Celina is the distraught widow, the avenging widow and coy seductress, all in one. Her dearest friend (Amrita Arora), she says, has a grudge against her.

Aftab, poor patsy that he is, sets out to right all her wrongs. But all is not what it seems and as the lies pile up, so does the body count. After a long and prolonged climax, that anyone with a sense of Hindi films can see coming a mile off, just desserts are meted out.

One wonders why Vikram Bhatt has gone around tom toming that Red's genre is film noir. There is nothing noir about it except that it seems to rain an awful lot in Mumbai and all the action takes place at night. But can anyone please explain how come the streets in Mumbai are always deserted?

Nobody in the cast really 'acts' in the true sense of the word making all other comment redundant.

indumirani@gmail.com
dnaindia.com

Dread this!

Mayank Shekhar

FILM : Red
DIRECTOR: Vikram Bhatt
ACTORS: Aftab Shivdasani, Celina Jaitley
Mirror rating : *

Aftab's is a character without an explained history or geography. Whatever his name, it will make no difference to the film. Suffice it to learn, he has just returned from a successful heart-transplant operation. Minutes before, he was on death-bed. He found an organ donor in a nick of time. He has just one person to thank for his life — a young widow (Jaitley, unintentional but necessary comic relief) who phoned the hospital and sent her dead husband's heart over.

As we speak, the hero has found his life-saver's address. He is standing by the disturbed, distressed widow's window — spying on the lonely girl. Now, this may be an odd way to pay gratitude. But I guess that's the way the cookie crumbles here; let's not argue with that.

Too soon, we watch Aftab's Mr Anonymous hide by the window-sill and imagine in his head his slim babe of a benefactor at a discotheque, while everyone is rocking to a Himesh Reshammiya number. It's a weird dream, while you're snooping around a stranger in the night. But that takes care of Himesh Song # 1 from the album. Don't turn red yet. The party's just begun.

We know Himesh sells, or so we're told. We also know sex always will. This is just a neatly perfected, inspired cinematic experiment on how to fit a film between sex and Himesh!

Let's see: love at first (or second) night should help (yelp, our leading buddies don't quite fire up a halogen-lamp. The publicized, 27-minute kissing sequence, while I'm not sure of the clock-time, appears more like a video on a loop).

A murder should help certainly: that would be of another unexplained Mr 'Doesn't Matter'. Once in a while the camera can also pan to two other three-scene characters: a curious cop (Sushant Singh; saving grace) and the widow's weirdly sly friend or foe, we're not sure (Amrita Arora).

You've already witnessed the accomplice to the committed crime; you'll second-guess the master-mind within the first few minutes. If you're half-intelligent, the end is none of your concern.

You could be mildly concerned for Aftab's macho-boy kicking things all over the place without a cabal or a cause though. It's not fair on a poor patient in lust. We think he should calm down. We're happy he found a heart-donor.

In any case, by now, I am in serious need of a brain-transplant. Interested donors, please apply. First thousand entries will receive a year-long supply of Himesh, and this film's collector's edition DVD. Without much up there, you'll enjoy them more.

www.mumbaimirror.com

Review: Red
Nikhat Kazmi

Red (thriller)
Cast: Celina Jaitley, Aftab Shivdasani
Direction: Vikram Bhatt
Rating:*

Why Red? Why not Grey? Specially since most of the film has been shot in a ghostly gloom, with a weeping-wailing Celina Jaitley permanently caught in silhouette.

Vikram Bhatt returns to his bleak underbelly of the human psyche where murder becomes the moot point of romance; and love becomes a cat and mouse game. Aftab is a heart patient who gets a timely heart transplant and is all set to pick up the strings of his life again.

Only, he unfortunately decides to find out the name of his donor and ends up playing peeping tom to the comely widow (Celina) of the man who gave him a new lease of life.

Mysterious widow. Mysterious circumstances of death. Mysterious intruders. Mysterious diaries. And mysterious demands of lust, love and passion.

It's neither edge-of-the-seat, nor intense and dark. Just bleak. Watch it if you want to see Celina non-perform and Aftab video-walk to Himesh Reshamiya's faltu tunes.

timesofindia.indiatimes.com

Red : Movie Review

09th Mar 2007 23.52 IST
By Nikhil Kumar

Cleavages and passionate kisses don't make a movie. Nor does the stylish cinematography and lighting. A gripping story, which is the backbone of any good film, is missing in Vikram Bhatt's 'Red'.

Red , which comes with a punchy tagline 'The Dark Side', is an erotic thriller and murder mystery rolled into one. The sad part is that the suspense is there only for the characters in the film. For the viewers, it doesn't take more than minimal common sense to realize who is playing the manipulative game in the movie's plot. And that is a big downer.

The only thing that can make you (I mean the male gentry) sit through the whole movie is Celina Jaitley's perpetually exposed cleavage and her hot, simmering romance and kisses with Aftab Shivdasani. Yes, 'Red' offers more titillation than thrills.

Aftab Shivdasani plays Neel Oberoi, a millionaire with a hole in his heart. He needs a heart transplant to survive. Luckily he finds a donor.

The donor is Anuj, who died in a car accident. Anuj's widowed wife Anahita ( Celina Jaitley ) is a young and beautiful woman who now lives a sad and lonely life.

Neel wants to thank the donor's family and he begins to follow Anahita. Attraction builds up between Neel and Anahita and soon they are drawn into a passionate emotional and physical relationship.

It is then Anahita reveals to Neel the truth about her husband's death. So blinded is Neel in his love for Anahita that he is ready to commit murders for her.

Also embroiled in the plot is Anahita's friend Riya ( Amrita Arora ), apparently a woman with negative shades. And there is also a cop ( Sushant Singh ) who is out to solve a murder mystery.

Vikram Bhatt gives a noir feel to the film. The cinematography is really different. The lighting is in dark red tones and the camera angles make the movie visually sleek and elegant. The music by Himesh Reshammiya is just about passable. Only two songs "Afreen" and "Ameen" stand out.

Among the performances, Aftab Shivdasani leaves a little impact. With this movie, Aftab sheds his cute-boy-with-dimpled-smile image. Not only does he look mature, his acting too has improved. Celina Jaitley looks enticing. Her acting is pretty average. Amrita Arora has a very small part and Sushant Singh plays the typical, sharp-minded cop.

The biggest flaw in 'Red' is the way the story is presented. The dialogues are pretty banal and the script is riddled with plotholes. Although the movie starts off quite well, it becomes utterly predictable in the second half. And the climax, which is shoddily conceived and executed, puts the last nail in the coffin of 'Red'.

www.apunkachoice.com