It is Manoj Bajpayee who brings ‘asli dum’ to this utterly predictable, loud, done-to-death ‘Violent Love Story’. He’s done all of this before—the leering, the jeering, the dialogue delivery– but he does it with full zest. I wouldn’t like to meet his character coming down a dark street.

With some easy moments, this film could have been easier to watch, but not when there is no break from loud background music, loud melodrama, and loud dialogues. Even the children, who all try hard to be as natural as possible, are weighed down under all the preachiness.

Parts of it grab you, especially the interplay between the deeply unhappy Tejaswini Kolhapure and the unsmilingly vicious Ronit Roy: I wanted to know more about these people, and what makes them tick. But the film backs off from them, and stays a zig-zag between being a police procedural and a human drama that wants your jugular.

Post interval, it slumps. The focus, which till then is on a character who intrigues us while interesting things are happening to him, gets diluted by a wholly superfluous romance (and songs, tuneful as a couple are), and a face-off between the guy awash in other-worldly goodness who asks all the right questions and the bad godman who has all the wrong answers.

You are engaged only when the game is on, and it appears to have been executed with some authenticity : that should have been the sole focus of the film.

Barun Sobti gets the hungry-actor look right, but Shenaz Treasurywala needed to be deeper…

Like all his films, ‘Lingaa’ is basically three hours of Rajini Saar doing his thing. And it is three hours of full-on `masti’ and ‘mazaa’: no half-measures for the man who just has to walk across the screen in slo-mo to send his fans into paroxysms.

The last Prabhu Dheva outing, ‘R Rajkumar’, was so unbearable that I thought I would be scarred for life. ‘Action Jackson’ is almost as vile: the only reason I stuck around was to see if Ajay Devgn would start making like Prabhu Dheva by the end. No, he doesn’t.

The three main characters as well as the bit parts do their job well. But after a point, it all becomes a bit too laidback, even the trying-to-get-laid bit. A little more fun would have put a little more, much-needed spring into Sulemani Keeda, which apparently loosely translates as “pain in the rear”. The title has its tongue firmly in the cheek; the film not as much.

What makes the film worth your time is the way it states, unequivocally, that the gas need not have leaked if Union Carbide and its employees and its votaries had come together to pull the plug in time.