Set before a judge, jury, and executioner, a man tricked into confronting his true self must be an exciting experience. But I have to sympathize with a hero who said: main thak hoon style, pak hoon style, jaane do mujhe. Or words in that sense. We hear you, my friend.
It takes a lot to throw away such an exciting premise on lousy writing.
But that’s precisely what Chehre did by director Rumi Jaffrey. The film starts on a promising note but soon drops. After a while, Chehre was were so weird that even experienced actors like Amitabh Bachchan, Anu Kapoor and Emraan Hashmi couldn’t handle the script. Even though everything looks perfect on paper, it doesn’t translate on the screen.
The head of a Delhi-based advertising agency, Sameer Mehra (Emraan Hashmi), is hit by hail. Four retired court officials invite him to spend the night in their haunted bungalow in a remote hill station. It’s not enough for Sameer to know that these old folks experiment with strangers for fun and have found their newest guinea pig. At first, he hesitantly gave up on his twisted “game”.
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Amitabh Bachchan is the eccentric prosecutor Latef Zeidi, Anu Kapoor is the severe defence attorney Paramediet Singh Bhuler, Dritiman Chatarci is the judge Jagdish Acharya, and Ragubir Yadav plays the passionate prosecutor Hariya Yatav. Together these four men create a lot of drama, delivering bright lines. But all of them go through significant turbulence before landing smoothly.
In this court, which they call the “real game”, there is no “realization” and “faisla” – no justice, only judgment. And that’s the pile we saw over the nearly two hours and 20 minutes as Sameer went on trial for the murder of his boss.
Chehre is an uninspiring thriller. It’s very crooked, but the twists and turns are sometimes very predictable. In many cases, the stories written by Ranjit Kapoor seem out of the ordinary. Still, especially when things seem attractive, the story develops so that it eventually loses momentum. They wish there were more thoughts to edit, and maybe it could be a clearer clock.
The dialogues that Rumi and Ranjit co-wrote are so heavy that they burden themselves.
There are many “shajar” out there, but you can just enjoy this lecture on Hindi literature. However, multiple single-channel devices caused laughter.
Here I would like to mention about 7 minutes monologue that Amitabh Bachchan gave. From the rape case at Nirbaya and the plight of acid attack victims to Uri’s surgical strike and the suspense at Indo-Pak, he touches everything under the sun in one breath without even getting to the point. It seems to be on. They all come from a good place, but the implementation has serious problems. Check out Kartik Aryan’s monologue by Pyaar Ka Punchnama, a better alternative to this sermon.
Amitabh and Emraan’s sequence is exciting. Anu Kapoor also adorns things with her Punjabi accent. Rhea Chakraborty (Anna), a mysterious helper and artist at home, loses herself in the role of a half-baked character who doesn’t allow her much.
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So does Siddhant Kapoor (Joe), who can’t speak. Krystle D’Souza (Natasha Oswal) looks quite impressive for her first big-screen appearance. The Crystal screen also features Samir Sonny as Emraan’s boss and husband, but he can simply ignore his exaggeration.
Chehre cannot be described as a courtroom thriller. Let’s say Rumi Jaffrey tries to get out of his comfort zone, but the film is just for viewing.