Advertisement
Cast: Ravi Kishan, Rajesh Shringarpure, Sanjay Swaraj, Rahul Singh, Kuldeep Dubey.
Advertisement
What’s Bad: The boring screenplay; the staid drama; the below-average performances of most of the rest of the cast.
Verdict: Chitkabrey will flop at the box-office because it has neither face value nor anything to offer by way of entertainment.
Loo break: Several.
Watch or Not?: Watch if you are tired of films dealing with the issue of ragging, and want to see the story go a step further.
User rating:
Avant Garde Productions’ Chitkabrey (A) is a drama about a person who returns, after 15 years, to take revenge on his college seniors who had ragged him in college.
Eight men, who were friends in college, and their wives/girlfriends, have come together for a get- together at a resort. While they are partying, they realise that they don’t know who had sent out the invitations for the party. As one of them tries to leave the party, the group realises that they have been kidnapped by a man, whose identity is not known and who has deployed armed men to keep them inside a room. The voice of the mystery man on the speaker informs the guys that they will remain inside till the time they reveal their dark secrets in front of their friends and wives. Left with no alternative, the guys talk about the misdeeds they had committed during college days and thereafter. Several of these expose that some among them had even cheated on their wives.
Soon, the mystery man comes out and the nine college friends are shocked to see that the man is none other than Rakesh Choubey (Ravi Kishan) whom they had ragged in college. It is revealed that Rakesh had been mentally and physically tortured and made to strip by the nine seniors. After 15 long years, Rakesh is out to avenge the humiliation which had made him a nervous wreck then. He now wants Rs. 15 crore in order to let the men go. He lets the wives/girlfriends go away so that they can put together the required money in 24 hours. But will the wives get the money, as they have been lied to/cheated on by their husbands/boyfriends? Does Rakesh kill one of the men as he has threatened? What is Rakesh’s real intention behind kidnapping all the men – is it just revenge or is there another motive too? The rest of the film and the climax answers these questions.
Suneet Arora’s story is well-intentioned as it tries to deal with the sensitive and socially-relevant issue of ragging in college and its after-effects. But that by itself, or the suspense angle that the writer has tried to introduce in the drama, do not add up to entertaining fare. The screenplay (by Sanjay Masoom, Vishal Vijay Kumar and Suneet Arora) moves at a tiresomely slow pace and bores the audience no end. All the interaction between the characters, supposed to thrill the audience or scare them, does not have the desired effect. A few sexual scenes add no real value to the film. What is probably worse than all of this is that since many of the actors playing the different characters aren’t well-known faces, the drama is so confusing that the audience loses track of several things. The angle of Rakesh permitting the women to go and arrange for the money to save the men looks contrived and a bit over the top. Similarly, the manner in which they arrange for crores of rupees in a matter of a day makes the whole believable drama look silly and impossible. Some of the sub-plots (a couple fighting over contesting elections, another couple getting ready for an orgy etc.) have quite limited or even no relevance to the main plot, thereby only diluting the overall impact of the drama. There are also continuity jerks as scenes contradict one another at times. For instance, Fauzia is shown to be happy when her father tells her that the death of her husband (if she did not pay the ransom money) would actually help her realise her political dreams, but the same Fauzia, after some time, takes the ransom money to save her husband. Dialogues, written by Sanjay Masoom, are routine.
Ravi Kishan delivers a fine performance. Among the others, Rajesh Shringarpure (playing Joginder Singh Grewal), Kuldeep Dubey (as Amaan Ali Siddiqui), Bobby Vatsa (as Bala), Sanjay Swaraj (in the role of Deepak Sareen)and Rahul Singh (Jayan Patel) do reasonably well. Akshay Singh (as Edvin Verghese) and Amit Bhardwaj (as Shankar) are okay. Vishwajeet Chatterjee (in the role of Buddhadeo Basu) is dull. Khushboo Gupta (playing Rekha) acts ably. Jaswinder Gardener (as Fauzia) does justice to her role but does go overboard at places. Akshara Gowda is ordinary as Palak. Svitlana Manolyo does a fair job as Cindy. Puja Gupta (as Anjali Patel) fills the bill. Susanna Mohan (playing Kavita Basu) is alright. Divya Dwivedi (as Sandhya Sareen) gets hardly any scope. Pitobash and the other supporting actors have pathetic roles to play.
Click next for more on the direction & box-office verdict
Suneet Arora’s direction is ordinary. He has not been able to make the drama emotional or even heart-touching. Music (by Akshay Bafila) is dull. K. Raj Kumar’s cinematography is poor. Kuldeep Mehan’s editing is shoddy. Production values are average.
On the whole, Chitkabrey is a flop show right from the difficult-to-understand title
Advertisement
