Chitti Chitti Bang Bang

Ideally Robot should have been made in the 80s (at probably 1/100th of its present budget), with less songs and many more punchy dialogues and thumpier scenes. Then it would have been ideal stuff for some pleasantly nostalgic viewings on lazy Sunday afternoons in Set Max/Star Gold/Zee Cinema. Coming as it is, in 2010, it's fun (the first half sprightlier than the second which is frequently shot down by unwelcome songs) but could have used some quality creative imagination on the script level to produce several 'aha' moments, rather than bludgeon the viewers with the combined might of lucre and technology (abundance of resources at disposal tends to blunt creativity, read that somewhere and have over the years found many reasons to believe it) I have a feeling that director Shankar is the kumbh-ke-mele-mein-khoya-hua-bhai of Michael Bay. Yeah, yeah I did not enter the theater expecting subtle and classy cinema. But hey I did not even come across a satisfying number of hoot-worthy scenes like I did in Hindustani or Pokkiri (the frame-by-frame remake 'Wanted' had a wickeder atmosphere and hence methinks it was a definite improvement but that's another story).

Maybe its a cultural remove at work but the intentionally comic scenes in films from South usually turn me off, Robot is no exception (for that that matter the humor present in the Japanese films of Akira Kurosawa also make me cringe; call me racist if you will, which was what a reader called Mayank Shekhar after reading his less-than-enthusiastic review of this film in Hindustan Times). Coming back to those idle Sunday afternoons, if I have a choice between Nagarjuna's Meri Jung 'The One Man Army' and Robot, I would go for the former for my 'paisa vasool' entertainment.