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Cast: Sikander Kher, Neha Oberoi, Arbaaz Khan, Shakti Kapoor
Director: Hansal Mehta
Rating: * ½
Woodstock Villa is director Hansal Mehta's attempt to replicate the film noir technique. But the attempt is woefully short on imagination and lacks bite. Mehta's film is dark and dank and thoroughly unexciting. The plot is basically a pooling up of various threads from different Hollywood thrillers. Maybe that's why it just
doesn't make any sense.
A successful businessman, Jatin Kampani (Arbaaz Khan) has a fallout with his wife Zara (Neha Oberoi) at a discotheque. A few days later she is kidnapped and ransom demands follow. Samir (Sikander Kher) is the down and out womaniser who flirts with danger and finds himself embroiled in the asinine kidnap cum murder drama laid out to entrap him.The story is complicated and frankly really not worth unravelling.
The director hoped to delineate shifting moralities in a fast paced modern world but only ends up painting a dark negative picture of today's generation. But that's not the issue really.
It's difficult to believe that there can exist two people with similar faces in the same city - and even if you want to give them the benefit of the doubt, it's even more difficult to imagine them being involved with the same man oh-so-conveniently. The plotting is gratuitous, there's very little logic used to hold the different threads of the story together. The characterisations lack depth and the dialogues are extremely pithy. The dark visuals are created in postcard-like splendour but when seen in continuum they fail to hold the narrative together.
Cinematographers R Mahesh Aney and Vikas Nowlakha seem to have been more interested in delivering a calling card than in engineering cohesion between technique and content. The sound design is atrocious and most of the time you have to endure some exasperating techno-screeches that act as punctuations for the unsavoury events that transpire on film.
The acting is extremely bombastic. Neha Oberoi looks dopey eyed and lacklustre, Gulshan Grover looks expressionless while reeling-off inane dialogues, Sachin Khedekar plays a bumbling plainclothesman with bewilderment and Sikander Kherin his debut film, despite having screen presence, seems more interested in getting his poses right than in realising a flesh and blood character. The film is heavy on style but has very little substance. There really is no method to this madness!
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