Romeo V/S Juliet

Did we just hear Shakespeare sighing in his grave?

How do you rate a film where each and every actor performs like they are part of an open-air jatra performance? What do you call a film which has a ridiculous plot that shows a village boy lusting after London’s richest girl on Facebook? And when his family and neighbours try to get him married to the village headman’s fat and ugly niece, he snubs them citing his intention to marry the said London girl. Thereafter, he travels to London (money? passport? visa? go figure) to woo the girl and girl, instead of lodging harassment charges against a creepy stalker, readily falls in love with him! Lastly, how do you rate a film whose hero (Ankush) and heroine (Mahi)’s performances make you worship Uday Chopra and Nargis Fakri? That's filmmaker Ashok Pati’s latest over-the-top venture, Romeo Vs Juliet for you. Did we just hear Shakespeare sighing in his grave?

No, it doesn’t help that half of the film is shot in London’s beautiful locales; it also doesn’t help that Kharaj Mukherjee, the brilliant actor that he is, makes good of a bad situation and gives the bored-to-tears audience a few laughs. Finally, it also doesn’t help at all, when disco lights hanging from the roof of the theatre starts flashing as soon as a song sequence starts! After getting tortured for the never-ending two and a half hours, watching Ankush, who makes a fool of himself on screen and a Bangladeshi heroine, whose name has more screen presence (in the form of the song Tui aamar Mahiya Mahi), than her actual self, this poor reviewer has one piece of advice for the director — do not put in an imitation of the iconic ‘suicide’ scene of Sholay in a film that's made with a lot of money and zero logic. It might give the frustrated audience wrong ideas.