Just shy of two hours and thirty minutes, ‘Department’ is tedious and boring and doesn’t have any of the originality of ‘Satya’ and ‘Company’, or even the occasional tension of ‘Sarkar’. Dutt delivers his lines like he’s reading out the phone book, and Bachchan hams it up no end as the gangster-turned-minister. It’s only Rana Dagubatti who approaches the film with any earnestness whatsoever.

If Ram Gopal Varma were to film me writing this review, I assume he’d start with a tight close-up. First of my eyes watering from his new film’s assault, then a series of jump-cuts showing me massaging temples, yawning, cringing in my seat, then — abruptly — a slow-motion walk to my writing desk.

Varma has described Department as “Quentin Tarantino meets Prabhudeva.” I honestly couldn’t find flashes of either. To me, it felt more like pedestrian Ram Gopal Varma. We are still waiting for him to return to form.

Department tells a virile story with no patience for sappy humbug. It’s not meant for those who think lovers laughing their way into death, as they did in Ishaqzaade, are the last words in ruinous relationships.

On the whole, Department is a below-average fare that will appeal only to a few audiences who will like the action, in spite of the ordinary script and the irritating narrative style.

On the whole, DEPARTMENT is neither novel, nor experimental, but a return to the tried and tested formula. Disappointing!

While Ramu must have thought that it would be a good enough reason for majority to check out DEPARTMENT, it only threatens to be a definite put off for most. Add to that a pencil thin storyline on which it bases itself and there is a ticking bomb that ends up exploding on the face of everyone involved.

Sadly this is the case with Department, although RGV impresses with his use of cameras and shot compositions, the script hampers everything and ends up offering nothing new and is cliched in parts. What I would like to see is other filmmakers take up this method of filmmaking, but armed with more novel scripts. If you are a RGV fan, a fan of underworld films and an avid filmmaker then do check Department out, but be warned that it is not a patch on any of his earlier works. Otherwise you can give it a miss.