‘F*UGLY* begins with a hint of promise, and it could have gone down some paths less travelled. But it meanders, and loses its way.

There are a few enjoyable moments in ‘Filmistaan’, but the potential is never fully realized.

‘Holiday’, the official remake of the monster Tamil hit ‘Thuppaki’, gives Akshay Kumar a chance to return to full combat mode. He plays a patriotic soldier willing to stretch a few rules in the line of duty, whether it is wielding sharp shears on a suspect’s finger, or shooting bad guys point blank. Till he’s going bang bang, he’s all right; the moment he gets romancing and joshing, he slides. So does the film.

The film ends up being a strictly average, and mostly bland, slice of Delhi life. There’s a great deal of Punajbbi Hindi, but that’s par for the course of this kind of template-y film. For variation, we get Bihari, from a guard and his ‘sari’-loving wife whom he has left behind in Darbhanga, and Kanpur Hindi, from Kuku’s ‘badmaash mama’. Sit.com territory, stretched out to accommodate a film.

Even Rajinikanth, the one and the only, can’t pick up a film and run with it, if it has the oldest, creakiest plots cobbled together from many books.

Boy looks at girl. Boy falls for girl. Girl’s father growls. Boy scowls. Girl howls. And I’m left sobbing into my popcorn.

If they had maintained the tone, ‘The Xpose’ would have been a hoot. But songs get stuffed in, a love angle slows things, and it gets stuck in cop stations and courts. They should have just kept the cheese thick. Here’s a sampler, from early in the film. A producer tells an aspirant : “na dance na expression na pose, sirf xpose!”. Classic. Nothing more would have been needed.

There should have been more history and more competence in ‘Children Of War’ for it to be the film it had set out to be.

Mastram turns out to be much too banal. The re-creation of an era which could have lent the film some heft, is wholly missing from the story.

It’s tough to make a true-blue sports film, minus song and dance and melodrama, in Bollywood. This one has tried.