Few other reviews which is not so good:
Raja Sens review:
Ra.One: What a letdown!
Arjun Rampal [ Images ] is the best thing in the biggest budget Indian feature of all time, says Raja Sen.
Once in a while, movies compel you to write odd things. You end up with sentences you stare at in disbelief, wondering if your fingers misled you or you slipped up dyslexically, missing a crucial word or a thought. This film, the biggest budget Indian feature of all time, provides one such daft line: Arjun Rampal is the best thing in this movie.
That fact should, in itself, tell you all. Still, I'm getting far ahead of myself. Ra.One is a subpar superhero film with a mediocre soundtrack and occasionally terrific effects. For those of you looking to compare, it's well below Krrish [ Images ] on the superpecking order, and far, far below Robot.
It has a good villain in Rampal, a striking heroine in Kareena Kapoor [ Images ] and a visual effects team that, while derivative, gets the job done rather well. The problem lies in the hodgepodge script -- a congealed instant-noodles mess of mixed flavours and overzealous Bollywoodisation -- and, even more crucially, in the man.
There is far too much Shah Rukh Khan [ Images ] in Ra.One, and while the man can normally be counted on to entertain no matter how completely he overwhelms us with his presence, this is him trying too hard in a film that straddles the disparate worlds of Shankar and Farah Khan [ Images ], and, having been made by Anubhav Sinha, falls painfully flat.
Somewhere in the script was a simple idea -- that of a video game villain wreaking havoc in the real world -- with potential for an enjoyable romp, but as the unambitious plot was scaled up to dizzying heights, much masala was injected thoughtlessly into it, as if each scene in isolation needed to be packed with every colour of cool.
The film's narrative, as a result, is disjointed and sluggish, with a mere handful of good scenes. The rest is not just filler, but lengthy, exhausting, filmi filler -- the kind of kitsch a film like this should really have left behind.
An Amelie-haired young boy (Armaan Verma) addicted to video games considers his father (Khan) a loser despite the fact that he makes high-concept games. Driven to create a game 'bad' enough to win him some brownie points, Khan's dweeby techie comes up with a villain loaded with artificial intelligence, one nearly impossible to beat.
From 'Random Access One' they start calling him Ra-One, at which point a Chinese colleague wonders if the game's hero could be called something similar. "G-One! Does it mean anything in Hindi?" he trills enthusiastically, since that's what a London-based software firm would obviously prioritise in its international products.
(Language is a constant irritant in the film. Shah Rukh introduces his luscious wife Kareena Kapoor to the aforementioned colleague's Chinese mother with "my better half," to which the lady says "Ni hao" and Kapoor diligently tosses in a "Namaste." Later, when Khan is held up by a London [ Images ] thug, he speaks in English while the goon helpfully talks in Bob Christo-accented Hindi. Ah well.)
The game itself, set in the year 2050 -- an ill omen for the film if ever there was one -- proves to be unimpressively simple, considering Khan's young son starts beating it the very first time it's ever played. It consists of full-body virtual reality suits, cool as a concept, but considering you'll have to leap in the air and execute a flying dropkick instead of just pressing Up and the yellow button, seems significantly tiresome.
Like the film itself is, slavishly throwing nonsensical jargon at us instead of letting the bad guy out as soon as possible.
The only saving grace in the first half is Kareena, who dazzles even as she acts her way out of a paperbagful of stock situations. By which I mean she acts just fine, but looks absolutely jawdroppingly ravishing, better perhaps than she ever has. The hemline of her white dress is the only reason to watch the Criminal song, and the one wicked moment she has is the film's only genuine surprise.
The effects, as said, are impressive but only occasionally. The action setpieces, while visually adept, lack urgency and propulsion. The most striking effect is that of RaOne and G-One taking shape as characters in the real world, big pixelly blocks building upon each other, the Tetris-like assembly delightfully looking like graphics rendering gradually. RaOne starts out like a Neo knockoff from The Matrix, but clearly means business once Rampal is in control. Rampal's menacing, cold and can dish out a helluva piledriver and appears in maybe six scenes in total.
The rest is for the filminess, you see. For G-One to wonder what Karvachauth is and then hug Kareena as voyeuristic neighbours cheer them on; for random pseudo-sufi yells in the background as characters feel pangs of emotion; for plotpoints to be reiterated over and over and over again. And, most critically, for embarrassingly broad 'comedy' that never ever gets a laugh. The Rajnikanth [ Images ] cameo works, sure, but does so by default -- and makes no sense whatsoever.
There are people who will let this film slide. Who will say it's not bad "for a Hindi film." That if we make a superhero film we'll have to add in lots of Bollywood to make it commercially feasible, and this is as good as it gets. Hogwash. For those doubters I have two words: Mister and India [ Images ]. I'm glad Khan stuck his neck out and gave us a project of this magnitude, one other genuinely inventive superhero movies will doubtless use to create truly special films. Ra.One, of course, is far from it.
There is but one prerequisite of a superhero film: A central character we care about. Here, as Khan flits from hit persona to persona, there is no sense of consistency. The game designer appears sometimes socially handicapped, and sometimes (in flashback) an utter charmer; G-One speaks haltingly like a robot, and then breaks into rap. The film seems to think that nothing seems to matter as long as there's enough Khan, and it becomes tragically evident that this is a project born more out of vanity than passion.
Rediff Rating: 1 1/2 star
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Abhishek Mandes review:
Review: Ra.One is SRK's most expensive midlife crisis
Among other things, Ra.One has been labelled as Shah Rukh's most expensive midlife crisis. Perhaps there is some truth to that, feels Abhishek Mande.
Anyone, who has written about India [ Images ] in the last 10 years, will probably tell you about the 'two Indias' -- one that is leaping and bounding towards the future, eager to embrace everything that is new and the other that continues to be tied down by archaic traditions, refusing to adapt.
One wouldn't be entirely incorrect if one says the same about Shah Rukh Khan's [ Images ] Diwali [ Images ] release Ra.One.
Starring Khan alongside Kareena Kapoor [ Images ] and Arjun Rampal [ Images ], Ra.One, on the one hand, has special effects that no Hindi movie can boast of so far, but on the other, it is saddled with an almost 1990s-style treatment with songs popping out of nowhere and dialogues that make you cringe.
Even as Shah Rukh Khan flies over buildings, jumps over cars and even stops an out-of-control train with his bare hands, his valiant efforts to wow his audiences somewhat fail thanks to a weak storyline, some rather juvenile acting and a poor screenplay.
To make matters more unbearable, the dialogues go from bad to worse and Vishal-Shekhar's music -- barring a couple of numbers -- has little to offer in a film that could have possibly ushered in an era of science fiction cinema in mainstream Bollywood.
In a sense, Ra.One is a modern-day retelling of Frankenstein. A young boy (played rather well by debutant Armaan Verma) tells his techie father Shekhar (Shah Rukh Khan) to create a super-villain (played by Arjun Rampal), who isn't just evil but also invincible. The nerdy father, who heads a gaming division of a company, gives him just that not realising what he's unleashed upon the world.
Ra.One, you see, is a video game named after the antagonist in it who, because of the artificial intelligence programme (and a process too complicated to understand) designed into him, manages to break out of the virtual world and step into our world.
Needless to say, much havoc ensues and Shekhar's son Prateek manages to find himself in the eye of the storm and on the run from his evil nemesis who can take the form of anything he sees or touches, quite like T-1000 from Terminator 2: Judgement Day.
The allusions to popular sci-fi movies don't end here. There's a bit of Bicentennial Man with Sonia (Kareena Kapoor) falling in love with G.One, the boy that has the face of her dead husband and protects her and her son from a seemingly inevitable end. And there's even a hint of Matrix with trench coat-sporting characters cricking their necks before delivering punches.
The list can go on but what makes Ra.One such a drag is that through all of this, you're never once able to relate to any of the characters in the film let alone anything else.
Sci-fi movies do require a certain willing suspension of disbelief, but the makers of Ra.One demand a heck of a lot more. They seem to expect their audiences to take a blind leap of faith and hope that the charisma of one of India's biggest stars manages to hold the movie together.
Sadly and somewhat predictably, it doesn't.
Ra.One is one long disjoined chain of events and scenes that aren't just half-baked, but also lackadaisically connected with the seemingly sole purpose of being able to show the (almost) 46-year-old actor performing some breathtaking stunts.
Shah Rukh Khan is arguably one of India's greatest stars.
For most part of his career, Khan has had us eating out of his hands playing the inimitable lover. When his boyish charm and baby fat went away, Khan transformed himself into a cheeky hero akin to the character he played in the second half of Om Shanti Om [ Images ], getting away by saying and doing the darndest things.
Ra.One is Khan trying to reinvent himself yet again, this time as an action star, a dream that I am told he's harboured for the longest time.
It isn't surprising that his next film set for an Xmas release is Don 2, the action-thriller where he plays a dreaded underworld don. And even as he looks promising in it, his role in Ra.One leaves a lot to be desired.
For the entire first half of the movie, we see Khan as a bumbling father who talks in a rather cliched south Indian accent, eats noodles and curds with his hands and hopes to gain his son's acceptance by doing everything from dressing up in tight leather pants to even going to the extent of creating an invincible villain for him.
If, by making him do all of this, director Anubhav Sinha hoped to make Shekhar lovable, I am not sure he succeeded.
It is only much later, almost closer to the intermission that we see Shah Rukh Khan's 'action avatar'. Here, in one particular shot Khan as G.One is perched atop a broken car against a London [ Images ] skyline. His intense look and poise sparks a glimmer of hope in a movie that promises to be a dreadful watch.
Unfortunately, it lives up to this promise and everything from there is a downhill ride despite all the special effects and some rather cool action scenes.
Which brings me to the SFX. There is no doubt that the effects we see in Ra.One are the best in Bollywood yet, but to say that they're comparable to the Western standards would probably be an overstatement.
Ra.One seems to have been put together rather half-heartedly -- a song forced in here, a handful of laughable special appearances there (including an unforgivable one of Superstar Rajinikanth) and a little slapstick comedy and rona-dhona thrown in too.
In the weeks before its release, Ra.One has been called many things. Among them, it has been labelled as Shah Rukh's most expensive midlife crisis. After watching the movie, it seems to me that perhaps, just perhaps there might be some truth to it after all.
I am going with 2 out of 5 star ratings for Ra.One, a film that could have been great fun but didn't live up.
Rediff Rating: 2 star
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Mixed reviews for Ra.one tooš¤ I am going to give it a shot anyway on Fridayš
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