Wish the dialogues had a little more punch. Wish Sooraj reflected a little more on the darkness beneath the light but overall it is a family get together that you don’t mind attending in festive mood.

The dialogues are laced with cuss words to make the cosmetic scenarios sound authentic and then songs come in to prove that it is usual Bollywood fare. There is a strong Chameli hangover but while Sudhir Mishra’s film had a certain grace and humanness about the murky, morbid world, here the approach oscillates between amateurish and exploitative.

It is like a complex crossword puzzle where the director doesn’t want to share the clues and keeps dropping lies to startle you in the end. It is like that child who used to lie that wolf is coming and when one day when the wolf really makes an appearance nobody cares to believe him.

There is hardly any intermingling of the black and white. Also, the jail break sequences and the subsequent chase demand more raw intensity than the slickness of the first half. And nothing is more frustrating when a thriller begins to sound like a drama!

Unlike Queen, it doesn’t feel like a take-off from a lived reality. There are some honest moments between JJ and Alia and Alia and her father that make you go gooey but for rest of the time it floats between generic and farcical.

Staying hungry is a better idea than trying this cold Pullav…

Carrying forward the flavour of the original, it is a film that many men make in their minds!

…the director does a fairly good balancing act but when you remove the flesh and come down to the wire, you realise that the director is smitten by CGI imagery. No crime, but it makes the work of an artist, who always maintained that he is not a circus clown, a little gimmicky or what you loosely call Hollywoodish. It becomes all the more apparent for those who have watched James Marsh’s astonishing Oscar winning documentary on the subject.

The plot has all the ingredients for an entertaining potboiler but the director and the dialogue writer do not create empathy for the characters.

Its intentions might be blunt but as a piece of cinema Talvar is a sharp procedural.