Race movie rating and review

Race (2008) Movie Rating and Review :

Rating :

Acting – 6/10
Direction – 3/10
Screenplay – 2.5/10
Music – 7/10
Technique – 7/10

Review :

Fruitless fratricide

Do you love fruits? Natural or dry? Apples, bananas, strawberries? And, oh yes, what about sugarcane? If you do, don’t watch Race. That is if you have not already. Because chances are that after you watch the fruitfetished Anil Kapoor stripping sugarcane with his teeth and asking Sameera Reddy to “chuso”, you may not want to get lost in a ganna ke khet again.

Kinky? You ain’t heard anything yet. Akshaye Khanna watches his wife Bipasha Basu have sex with his stepbrother Saif Ali Khan thanks to a CCTV camera which can zoom and give you different angles at will. Later, you find out Bipasha is Saif’s girl and he knew Akshaye was watching!

Don’t worry about spoilers. Because there are so many kahaani mein twists, you never know what is really going on. From the little that makes sense, Akshaye is the deprived chhota bhai who wants to win the race of life against Saif and net a few millions.

Then there is a seducing secretary, a murderer model, that fruity cop and his super stupid assistant. They all make their dhoom-dhoom appearances on South African trainer in super slo-mo. Next they sing hip-hop, they dance salsa, they blow up cars, they kill spouses, and they return from the dead… it just goes on and on and on.

If you are wondering why it is called Race, well, there is horse racing, cycle racing, car racing and of course, chomp-your-fruit racing.

Race tries to pick so many brains so many times that it turns out to be a complete no-brainer. If you cannot trust anything you see, there is a sense of being cheated rather than gratified.

Abbas-Mustan, over the last view films, has become so manipulative that they have lost their natural license to thrill. The makers of such excellent thrillers like Khiladi and Baazigar now come across as smug con artist who want to play this never ending game one-up-manship with the audience, but as the tagline of Race says – “One brother plays to win; one brother plays to defeat”- you always end up a loser if your goal is to trick and not thrill.

Saif is supposed to look good in his various permutations and combinations of the shades-stubble-suit trio. He does. Bipasha is supposed to look enigmatic in scenes and hot-hot-hot in songs. She gets the second one right.

Akshaye is the only guy who is supposed to act. He does, only sometimes there is a very strong Humraaz hangover. Katrina is supposed to look fetching. Anil Kapoor is supposed to munch fruit and mouth some of the corniest lines in Bollywood history in a mumbo-jumbo angrezi accent. There is a hint of old Johnny Lever in the one scene he gets.

It is the crew which has more to do. Pritam’s music, Ravi Yadav’s cinematography, Allan Amin’s stunts and Anahita Shroof Adajania’s costumes minimize the fatigue. But despite everything Race remains that one wrong’un you would not like to play.

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