Umar: Masand's verdict

From Karan Razdan, the director of such sleazy potboilers as Hawas and Girlfriend, comes this week's new Bollywood release Umar.

Now this one's a film set in London, about three 70-something fogies (soldiers) - Kader Khan, Prem Chopra and Satish Kaushik - all of whom have only one thing in common. They have nobody in the world who cares for them.

Prem Chopra's son treats him like a servant, Satish Kaushik's children leave him to baby-sit the little ones, and Kader Khan lost his son in a police attack, and post 9/11 he's constantly dealing with racial harassment because he's Muslim.

Disillusioned with the world and without enough money to even buy three ice-creams, these golden oldies find a purpose to their lives when they decide to help a good-as-gold Indian boy Jimmy Shergill who's being falsely implicated in a murder he didn't commit.

From the very first scene itself, this film reinforces every single stereotype about NRIs that you've ever seen or heard of in your life. In Bollywood, you can have only two types of NRIs - the ones who've forgotten their culture and who disrespect their parents, or the ones who're still very much in love with the smell of their soil and can rattle off prayers and scriptures at the snap of a finger.

This film plays on all of these stereotypes, and every single character in the film is as good as a cardboard caricature with lines so predictable that you could have scripted them yourself without any difficulty at all.

To say that Umar is amateurishly scripted, is being very kind to Razdan who's even written the film himself.

It's a script that's so full of holes, you could use it as a fishing net. Lots of writers resort to cinematic liberties to help themselves out of sticky plot situations, but Karan Razdan replaces basic logic and reason with cinematic liberties, so the film hardly makes any sense at all.

Like why would any murderer not make sure his victim's cellphone is in his possession after he's committed the murder - especially if the phone is full of incriminating images?

Or why would four most wanted murder suspects roam the streets in broad daylight, and break into brawls in public places? I could ask at least a dozen such very basic questions to which I suspect Razdan would have no logical answers.

On some level, Umar tries to stir up the same emotions that seduced us in Baghbaan - concern for the elderly, respect for parents, attachment to one's roots.

But the makers of Umar forget that Baghbaan had one very important asset that Umar doesn't - Amitabh Bachchan.

To make matters worse, Umar stars three of the most annoying actors in those roles that are meant to arouse those emotions.

Now you can hardly feel any pity or sympathy for Satish Kaushik who hams and overacts like there's no tomorrow, or for Prem Chopra who is so loud and so animated that your temperature rises every time he walks into the frame.

It's only poor Jimmy Shergill who brings some level of sincerity to his role. But even squeaky-clean Jimmy with the big Shah Rukh Khan hangover can't do very much to salvage this dud.

There's a scene in Umar in which the villain tortures Jimmy Shergill by pulling out the nails from his fingers with a pair of pliers.

Believe me, the pain that comes from watching this film can't be any less than the pain poor Jimmy suffers in that scene.

Umar is mind-bogglingly incompetent because it fails in just about every department - the writing is rubbish, the direction is practically non-existent, the background music is so inappropriate it makes you laugh, the ridiculously timed songs slacken the pace of the film, even the acting sucks.

But if, like me, you manage to sit through the entire film despite all the complaining, then there's really only one explanation for it. Some movies are so bad, that they make you laugh.

Then that's one out of five and a big thumbs down for director Karan Razdan's Umar, you'll age during the three hours that it takes to watch this film.

Rating: 1 / 5 (Poor)