Lookswise, the film is pure gorgeousness. Trouble is, it is also largely overwrought and inert. The meticulous detailing in the re-creation of one of the most pulsating periods of Bombay’s history, is terrific. Much of the film stays, mostly and disappointingly, on its sumptuous surface.

I’ve said this several times, but I’m ready to implore again: can Bollywood please, please stop making these tired, tiresome remakes? And let sleeping Gabbars lie?

You keep wanting this film to ‘ho ja shuru’, but ‘Kaagaz Ke Fools’ doesn’t have the feet for it.

Satire needs nuance: ‘Jai Ho Democracy’ drowns in obviousness. This, coming from Ranjit Kapoor, is a disappointment. The intention is fine, but the treatment is far from. And it criminally wastes an array of good actors: Kapoor, Puri, Hussain, Biswas, Bashir raise their decibel with zero impact. There’s a Mayawati-like character who is made fun of, and we smile, but she’s gone too soon. As is the point of this film.

The central question this film raises is profound: does the religion you are born into define you for the rest of your life? What if you are not who you believed yourself to be? It articulates the anxieties we live with, and uses the words ‘Hindu’, ‘Muslim’, ‘Isaai’ loudly and clearly, which is a relief because films these days are steering clear of these basic descriptives because we are now a nation of the easily offended. But it doesn’t jump into the deep end, carefully skirting the tough questions, and sticks to the majoritarian path, and clichéd representations.

Maybe the intention of the film was to tell us that ladies who dance for a living also have the right to respectability, which is wonderful, but a mothballed plot and an even more mothballed treatment isn’t the way forward.

‘Hunterrr’ is about a guy who can’t keep it in his pants…And what does it say about Indian society that men can be out-there hunters, and women have to be content to be under-the-radar prey? When will Bollywood give us a film in which men and women are equal opportunity offenders? Can it ever?

It’s not that Sharma, who has also produced the film, is not trying hard. She is, and up to a point, she is in fine fettle. But at the point when she turns from flee to fight, I stopped believing.

What we get is the kind of film which should have been deep-sixed before it was thought of. And dialogues that had me guffawing helplessly because there was nothing else I could do.

This kind of film can work if it has a new spin on an old story. But the cop who gets busy notching up kills, without making us wonder about the morality of someone taking it upon themselves to exterminate humans, is a cipher. So is the film. And the worst part? It’s full of blips, everyone’s lips going silent, as soon as, presumably, a cussword comes along.
Oh our delicate ears.