Movie Review : Ek Villain (2014)

Rating : Poor (1/5)
Genre : Thriller
Year : 2014
Running time : 2 hours 9 minutes
Director : Mohit Suri
Cast : Sidharth Malhotra, Shraddha Kapoor, Reitesh Deshmukh
Kidwise : PG-15

“Ek Villain” looked so good from the trailer that I was fooled into thinking it would be an actual thriller, with a story and believable characters. Since I persuaded a bunch of people (family included) to come with me to see the film, I am currently persona non grata with quite a few folks. Allow me to warn you off this film and prevent you from making the same mistake.

So there’s Guru (Sidharth Malhotra), a killer for hire, who is captured by the police but let go because of lack of evidence. Then there is Ayesha (Shraddha Kapoor), an ever smiling do-gooder of the nausea-inducing variety. Ayesha is a self-sacrificing self-made martyr, who on the slightest whim cracks open her handy diary (she carries this around everywhere) and jots down additions to her to-do list. On this bucket list are lofty aspirations of “saving a life” comingling with other earthy desires like “watching dolphins swim”/”spending time in a butterfly garden” etc. – you get the idea. Shraddha Kapoor with her thin frame, high-pitched voice (it drills straight into your brain) and feigned wide-eyed innocence, only serves to enhance the gratingly annoying quality of Ayesha’s character – like nails on a blackboard.

Ayesha finds Guru in the police station when there on another altruistic mission, and decides that Guru fits the bill for the “saving of life” category. Then on, she clings to him like a limpet. Guru, exhausted from fending her off (I sympathized), decides to help her with her bucket list. Sadly, fate (and a terrible script) intervenes. People start dying off mysteriously, and the film morphs pretty quickly from a lazy romance to a shoddy murder drama.

This film is supposed to be a thriller, but it is so poorly made that the element of “thrill” is laughably absent. There is very little rhyme or reason to the script and storyline, and the characters are sparsely sketched, poorly delineated and miscast. Malhotra as Guru, is hard to swallow as a bad guy, biceps or not. This actor, with his “good guy” face, is going to have a hard time playing negative characters because he does not look the part. Even as a nice guy, he can barely pass muster because of his limited acting skills. In a role which calls for much more anger, aggression and angst, Malhotra fails to deliver. But it’s not all his fault, the character is fairly cardboardish to begin with; we know very little of Guru, or of the way he thinks. Reitesh Deshmukh plays a middle class office worker striving to find his footing at work and home. Even though he doesn’t do too poorly, his character appears silly and not too bright.

Another major problem with this film is the way it depicts the killer’s motives for picking his victims, in that they are all outspoken women, who appear to have talked down to the killer. While the perpetrator is of unsound mind, it is still disconcerting to see how the storyline sort of pushes the blame onto the women, like if only they had not raised their voices and scolded the killer/criticized his work (rightly in some cases) they might have remain unscathed; sounds like subtle victim-blaming to me.

The film veers hither and thither, without much direction. There is one main goal of course – to find and bring the killer to book, but that is long drawn out and extremely ill-plotted. It takes a little more than 2 hours for this film to finish and by that time it almost drains your will to live :-). This is a not only a bad film, it is a stupid one too. Stupid as in non-scary-stupid-thriller with an inane storyline and doltish characters. Keep away from this hot mess.

Kidwise : Ek Villain gets pretty violent and gory, because the killer’s weapon of choice is a screwdriver and he wields it for maximum effect – all aggressive slashes and sharp-edged body slams. Voluptuous Prachi Desai also appears in a beer bar item number. While this song is not as terrible as some out there, it is still pretty vulgar.