Movie : Fight Club

“Ladies & Gentlemen, welcome to Indian cinema of the 80’s”. The same plot (or the lack of it), the same latka-jhatkas (although Amrita Arora is slightly bolder than Aruna Irani) and the same predictable ending (the good guys beat the bad guys in a final fight).  So what if we are almost a quarter century ahead in time and several notches ahead in quality and content. Here is a movie that serves old wine in a new bottle! I would have loved to give a brief plot description of the movie: tragedy is there is no plot to speak of in this flick! There is a lot of skin show (babes and hunks galore) and a lot of senseless violence but if you are looking for a unifying thread which some people call a story, sorry sir!

Since it is the duty of a conscientious reviewer to make his reader aware of what they are in for, here is what I vaguely remember happens in the movie amidst a lot of gore, bone breaking and horribly misplaced songs. A bunch of friends in Mumbai hit on a megaplan called the FightClub whereby they organize fights for a price for people who always wanted to kill each other but didn’t know how! Now if you thought that was weird, you are in for a real treat. One of the dudes’ uncle runs a club in Delhi and gets killed over a dispute as the baddies want to take-over the club and use it for drug peddling. His uncle dead, the dude decides to fight it out and revive the club and all his friends leave their respective families for good old ‘dosti’. Surprisingly, one of the foes of this band of boys (Sohail Khan) also joins their club as a bouncer even though he hates Zayed Khan. Ok, ok, logic is not exactly the hallmark of the movie.

Then there are a bunch of baddies: Rahul Dev (who Rahul Dev? the villain opposite Sunny paaji in the movie Champion… Champion who? ok … fuh-get it), Ashmit Patel (whose movies may have bombed but his MMS is already in the all time hall of fame), Yash Tonk (who plays someone in all of Ekta Kapoor’s serials and movies I am told) and Suniel Shhetty (I hope this is the numerologically correct spelling). They serve the general purpose of being beaten up and eventually being killed.

The bimbos in the film (Amrita, Diya and Neha) do not have a role to play in the movie and the only reason why any self-respecting actress would do such a role is only due to some serious financial crisis! The boys (Dino, Sohail, Ashish, Riteish & Zayed) hog the limelight or airtime through the movie. None of them, however, have the screen presence to hold the audiences for more than 4.5 seconds!

The biggest achievement of the film, however, is the universal appeal and impact that it has on audiences.  Sample this: An excruciating  45 minutes into the movie, some song featuring Zayed and Diya starts playing: there is an exodus from the theatre as just about every irritated soul in the hall leaves for the loo, to smoke or just to get some fresh air! Inane dialogues draw groans from the crowd as if a thousand teeth are being pulled out simultaneously and you know the film has managed to uniformly irritate everyone around you!

If you can still muster up the courage to watch the movie after reading this review, you must join the Armed Forces!!

Watchability Rating : 1/5