'Delhi-6' is nowhere close to 'Rang De Basanti'

Delhi-6
Director: Rakeysh Mehra
Rating: *½

Let's make one thing clear first: Rang De Basanti (RDB), by any standards, is a tough act to follow. Although expectations from Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra's next film after RDB is bound to be tremendous, its only fair to judge Delhi-6 on its own steam rather than looking at it as a RDB follow-up. Ok, now that this point has been made clear, it's safe to say this: Delhi-6 doesn't work. Not because it pales in comparison to RDB, but because its nearest competitor would probably be Mehra's own Aks, which is saying something.

Why? The story is dated, the screenplay long-drawn – in spite of a short running time of 2 hrs 20 mins, the film stretches at a number of places – and the motive unclear. Roshan Mehra (Abhishek Bachchan) arrives in India because his grandmother (Waheeda Rehman) wants to spend her last days in the place she spent most of her life – Delhi -6. His father (junior artiste) refuses to come back to the place that he had to leave for marrying a woman of another religion. The half-Hindu, half-Muslim Roshan arrives to the chaos of Delhi and is amazed at the warmth of the people, the smells emanating from food stalls, the traffic and superstitions.

This is also the time the famous monkey man, or kala bandar, chose to haunt the lives of those living in small Delhi lanes. The incident, which made national headlines and is said to have gripped Delhi in fear for a while in 2001, has been juxtaposed by Mehra and his team of writers – lyricist Prasoon Joshi and Kamlesh Pandey – in what is really the story of a man coming back to his roots. Nothing new in that, with Swades having dabbled with the plot. But the Monkey Man episode is the 'novel' factor here. Does it work? Hell no.

Reasons are plenty. Firstly, for most part, the film is hardly going anywhere. Ever since Roshan arrives, the writers take their own sweet time establishing characters and their respective sub-plots. Roshan and the audience are meant to be 'observers' to it all and although Roshan doesn't, you do want to shake things up and ask them to 'Move on!'

When that happens, post-interval, the handling is so amateurish that what could have been an interesting finale turns into a bizarre mélange of disjointed events. In fact, after taking close to two hours to give the viewer some inkling of a plot, the film wraps up its multiple stories in no time. So Roshan expresses his love to neighbour Bittu (Sonam), warring brothers get over their differences, a sweeper gets accepted by a man of higher caste whom she has been in love with for a while and a Hindu-Muslim tiff, touched upon briefly, is sorted. In between all this, Roshan delivers a speech about how the 'kala bandar' is hidden in all of us and how we need to kill it so we can live in a peaceful and happy environment.  Errr… haven't scores of heroes made that speech in a number of films? Remember Nana Patekar in Krantiveer with the 'yeh Hindu ka khoon, yeh Mussalman ka khoon' dialogue?

The Big B makes an appearance too, by the way. In one of the funniest sequences of the film, not intentional of course, Roshan goes to heaven for a very brief while, has a chat with his grandfather (Mr Bachchan himself) and returns back from the dead! They say Delhi-6 had two different endings – one happy, one sad and they chose to retain the happy one. The sad ending would have made some sense at least.

The editing's too slick for its own good and the background score by AR Rahman doesn't go with what's happening on screen. He, of course, can't be blamed for this. If there's anything worth mentioning in Delhi-6, it's Rahman's highly superior music. Genda Phool, in fact, is one moment you want to take away from the film. Sadly, most songs appear one after the other and then disappear as suddenly. Besides, the effort to make the initial reels 'musical' seems forced.

The performances are all good, but with actors like Rishi Kapoor, Om Puri, Supriya Pathak, Pawan Malhotra, Atul Kulkarni and Divya Dutta, you can hardly go wrong. Sonam Kapoor is adorable – sweet and sexy – and with better screen time, she could have done wonders to the film. Abhishek Bachchan is just about okay. The film required him to carry the story on his shoulders and he strictly disappoints on that front. And what's with the accent?! Very uncool.

Rakeysh Mehra shouldn't be worried. After Aks, he gave Rang De Basanti. May be Delhi-6 will ensure Rakeysh gives something more superior the next time round