Business rating: 0.5/5 stars
Advertisement
Language: English
Advertisement
What’s Good: Tom Alter and Kiran Kumar’s performances.
What’s Bad: The juvenile script; the unimpactful dialogues; the poor performances by the lead actors; the lack of any entertainment value whatsoever.
Verdict: With Love, Delhi! is a poor fare. Resounding flop!
Loo break: Several.
Watch or Not?: Watch it at your own risk. Even Dilliwallahs!
Red Maj Reves Films’ With Love, Delhi! (English) is about a case of kidnapping and how it is solved.
Ashish (Ashish Lal) is a history student in Delhi. He loves his best friend, Priyanka (Pariva Pranati), and proposes to her, but the latter considers Ashish a friend only and not a beloved. When Priyanka’s father, Mr. Khanna, a famous real estate builder, is kidnapped, Ashish comes to Priyanka’s rescue. A letter received by Priyanka from the alleged kidnapper warns her not to intimate the police. The letter also points to a clue painted on a wall in her house, which will lead her to her father. The kidnapper does not demand any ransom.
Ashish and Priyanka go about solving the first clue, ‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust’, which leads them to a historical monument in Delhi, where they find the next clue. As weeks go by, Priyanka starts worrying about her father, but Ashish doggedly keeps on deciphering clue after clue offered by the kidnapper, sometimes on a piece of paper and sometimes over the phone.
The kidnapper (Tom Alter) has locked up Khanna (Kiran Kumar) in a remote under-construction building, where he regularly tortures him. The kidnapper also reveals to Khanna that many years ago, he (the kidnapper) and his family had lost their life’s savings when they had bought a bogus property from the builder. Khanna apologises and says that he had stopped cheating his customers since the birth of his daughter. However, the kidnapper is relentless and keeps Priyanka going on a wild goose chase by giving her numerous clues, all of which, incidentally, lead to various monuments in Delhi.
Almost two months after the kidnapping, the kidnapper informs Priyanka and Ashish that he was going to give them a final clue that would lead them to Khanna. Are Priyanka and Ashish able to decipher the last clue and rescue Khanna? Or does the kidnapper extract his revenge? What is the real identity of the kidnapper? All these questions are answered in the latter part of the film.
Ashish Lal and Nikhil Singh’s story is very childish and boring. The writers have tried to weave information about Delhi’s historical monuments into the plot of a thriller. But since the plot is silly and falls flat on its face, the long-drawn sequences of Delhi’s monuments just end up boring and irritating the viewers even more. Nikhil Singh’s poorly-written screenplay makes things worse. Although the film is supposed to have a surprise in the climax (where the real identity of the kidnapper is revealed), the surprise is obvious to the audience half-way into the film because of the ample clues that are dropped at regular intervals. Moreover, not even one scene or sequence – be it emotional or dramatic – makes an impact on the audience. Couple that with the poor performances and the amateurish direction and you have a disaster on your hands.
Several loopholes in the script are worth laughing at. The fact that Ashish and Priyanka are regularly contacted by the kidnapper over phone, but they don’t try and trace down his location using modern technology even once, is mind-boggling. The fact that in the pre-climax Ashish comes very close to a person he knows, but fails to recognise him, also gets the audience’s goat. And there’s just no plausible explanation about why the kidnapper wants to take his victim’s daughter around the historical monuments in Delhi, except that he is a history teacher. There are no action scenes to speak of. The romance between Ashish and Priyanka fails to enthuse the audience. The dialogues are simply lifeless.
Ashish Lal is a disaster as the leading man – neither does he have the looks nor can he act. Pariva Pranati is just alright but she is let down by her co-star and the poor script. Tom Alter and Kiran Kumar, as the kidnapper and the builder respectively, are the only two whose performances are something to look forward to. Seema Biswas, as Ashish’s mother, is a letdown in her short role. The rest of the cast offer poor support.
Nikhil Singh and Ashutosh Matela’s direction is simply pathetic. They have not been able to rise above the poor script and are unable to make the drama believable, leave alone engaging or entertaining. The film has three songs (music by Sanjoy Chowdhury; lyrics by Amitabh Varma) that add zero value. The background score is clichéd. Sri Sriram’s cinematography is alright. Namrata Rao’s editing is average.
On the whole, With Love, Delhi! is a poor fare. It will not get the paying public’s love or patronage.
Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol Review
Advertisement
