A slow bore and a godman’s narcissistic advertisement – the box office disasters
Many chose to give the weekend releases a miss for Valentine’s day dates and the India-Pakistan match. Thank god for that. But, if you are not one of those intelligent ones, we are sorry for you. Did you spend Sunday night drinking profusely too, trying to forget the abomination you had paid to witness?
Roy
Directed by Vikramjit Singh and starring Ranbir Kapoor, Arjun Rampal and Jacqueline Fernandes, Roy is nothing but a misleading con show. It starts with a mysterious psychological drama but soon, you realize that you are expecting too much out of it. You know a film is bad when everybody in the theatre is either talking on their phone, ordering food incessantly or (this was seen only during Roy) posing and clicking selfies.
Mayank Shekhar’s review of Roy says, “Forget the script. Between three actors, two stories and an over-priced movie ticket, plays out the ultimate con game I’ve seen of late as I look back at a half-packed hall for a 9:40 am show in anticipation of a Ranbir Kapoor picture, or any picture at all.
“Roy is so tangled in its inflated, erratic ideas of a pseudo mystery that it ceases to make sense even before it takes off,” says Sukanya Verma of Reddiff.com.
“So here are my questions. Who wrote this? Who is it for? The mystery and the enigma, which are set up lazily and obviously, never really take root. I haven’t seen something as fuzzy and dreary as ‘Roy’ in a long time: just what is Ranbir Kapoor doing in a movie like this?” asks Shubhra Gupta of Indian Express.
If Roy made you stare at the blank screen in the theatre after the credits had rolled, wondering why on earth you spent so much for THIS (if you did sit till the end, that is), MSG is a disappointment on a whole different level. To start with, lead actor, script writer, singer, composer, cinematographer, director, have-I-missed-anything Saint Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh Ji Insan takes the Razzie this year. In every department. Many critics have refused to even call it a film. Some, though, thought it was a good competition to Sajid Khan’s Humshakals…
Sudhish Kamath of The Hindu says: “Think Punjabi Pineapple Express Man. Since the Hindi word for Man is Insan, it’s only fitting that this bizarre stoner hero, nay superhero, is not referred to as Spider-Man, Superman, Batman or Iron Man, but as Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh Ji Insan (Marvel Comics would have considered buying this except that the baap of What the Fatherness, Daddy Insan, is a marvel himself).”
IBNlive’s review reads: “MSG is not a film. It is a massive crash-course in self-promotion, a reflection of what its helmsman feels and why devotees fall by the millions at his milk-washed feet. This movie is more of a marketing gimmick than a film itself.”
“It’s not a film but blind self promotion. Watch it only if your survival depended on it. It’s another Gunda (Kanti Shah’s film) in making,” says Rohit Vats of Hindustan Times.
Raja Sen, in his hilarious review of the film, says: “… a godman casting himself as quickfix superhero in a film that claims he is the answer to some of our most pressing social and medical evils: farmer suicide, female infanticide, AIDS, thalassemia, rehabilitation of prostitutes, and the increasingly rampant drug problem in Punjab and Haryana. It is the latter that make up an unbelievably dead-eyed bunch of villains in this film, angered drug cartels who put a hit out on Saint Ji, sending incompetent assassins to try their best. (There is, as one can barely imagine, very little subtlety involved; the politician in charge of the cartel is unambiguously named Chillum Singh. I assume rejected names include Hashish Kapoor and Ganja Grover.)”
Our ratings for the two films:
Roy – One star, because we love Ranbir and Arjun. We also want to know what they were smoking when the script was narrated to them. Wait. Was there a script at all?
MSG – We’ll go with Raja Sen on this one – No rating. This is not a movie.