Direction: Abbas – Mustan
Cast: Saif Ali Khan, Anil Kapoor, Akshaye Khanna, Bipasha Basu, Katrina Kaif and Sameera Reddy
Banner: Tips Films Limited
Production: Kumar S. Taurani and Ramesh S. Taurani
Music: Pritam

Director duo Abbas-Mustan have created a genre for themselves – ‘Action Thrillers’. Naqaab, Aitraaz, Humraaz were thrilling, but RACE crashes em all!!

I won’t be giving out too many details this time around. Heck, the movie had so many twits n turns, I hardly remember those sudden turn of events. For most part of the movie you are left gasping, Those ‘Oh S***’s flood the theater every few minutes. Race is a very fast paced action thriller that keeps you on the edge of your seats, and is even better if you watch it on a big tv, with a corner tv mounts so you can install it in any part of your home.

Ranvir Singh (Saif) is a ruthless businessman who loves his younger brother Rajeev(Akshaye). Rajeev in turn loves only his liquor! Sonia (Bips), a beautiful model, is Saif’s lady. Sofia (Katrina) plays Saif’s PA. She has a crush on Saif who doesn’t reciprocate it(Now can you believe that!).

A life-insurance clause pays one brother 100 million dollars for the ‘accidental’ death of the other brother. This is when the going gets ugly. Brothers getting to the throats of each other just for some ancestral property? I wonder where they get such ideas from!! 😉

The story unfolds with a series of unexpected twists n turns. It all boils down to a winner-takes-it-all race. This race is to be the last for one of the two brothers while the other gets to claim the booty.

Cars, babes, booty… Abbas-Mustan have struck the perfect formula. Saif looks stunning. Bipasha Basu is as glamorous as ever. Katrina looks her very best but she still needs to improve her acting skills. She looks out of place at times. Akshaye Khanna stands out for his role. Anil Kapoor provides the much required comic relief in the second half of the movie. He plays his part well too. His assistant Sameera Reddy is thoroughly avoidable. Saif is said to have done all his action scenes himself (like jumping off a 20-storey building!). Watch out for that too.

AngadSodhi Dot Com Rating: 4/5

Conclusion: Race is an absolute must watch. Expect the unexpected. Superb cinematography, great songs, really cool action scenes. The only problem I see is that the story is out of this world. But then, an Abbas-Mustan is supposed to be unrealistic!

Watch it for Saif n Bips.

Spoiler warning?? That means I’ll be giving the details away!! Actually yes. If I don’t do that, all I can say is that it’s a flawless movie. Every creature on this planet (Yup. I took my pet roach to the movie and he came out sobbing too!!) would say that it’s a must watch. But that’s not all I have to say. At AngadSodhi Dot Com, things are done differently! OK enough bragging…

First of all I’d like to clarify that the movie is not at all about parenting. Maybe people have interpreted it wrongly, but it is definitely not about how parents must behave with their kids. What I mean to say is, what if your child is not dyslexic at all? And even if he is, a 3hr movie won’t do you any good! It’s just the chemistry between the two and the little guy’s acting skills that take you off your feet!

Ishaan Awasthi (Darsheel Safary) is a sweet innocent child whose dyslexia is detected only in the mid second half of the movie by his arts professor Nikumbh Sir (Aamir Khan). Just as they say that people with such disorders have some other talent etched onto them, Ishaan is good at drawing (hence those weird promos showing octopuses which relate neither to taare (stars) nor zameen (land) from the title).

Dyslexia (“Dys – impaired | Lexis – word” as my Homeopath sis clarifies every time the word is mentioned) is a disorder where the brain maps certain characters as a mirror image of how they actually are. So ‘d’ will look like ‘b’ and so on. A list of famous people with dyslexia include Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso, Leonardo DaVinci and (surprise! surprise!) our very own Abhishek Bachchan.

Ishaan’s falling grades prompt his parents to put him in a boarding school because they want him to excel in life. But the separation traumatizes the poor kid. Aamir is actually a teacher at an institute for the mentally challenged and detects Ishaan’s disorder. People do overcome this disorder and Nikumbh Sir (Aamir) himself had had that problem in his childhood! Thus the two bond well and their chemistry steals the show. Aamir is a temporary arts teacher at the boarding school and Ishaan loves drawing. Together they work hard to improve his writing and Ishaan shows signs of improvement.

The movie has plenty of scenes that bring tears down your cheeks. A very touching song titled ‘Maa’ just fits the bill. Ishaan makes a flipbook that shows his being drafted away from his family. In the end there’s an all school drawing competition that has plenty of emotional scenes (OK I won’t reveal those! See them for yourself).

The first half is all about the little boy’s carefree, sometimes careless but very innocent nature. Reminded me of my school days – almost always late to school, many a times out of the class if not on the bench! The lad’s acted really well I must mention. Does some really tough scenes really well. Put Aamir in his place and probably even he’ll make a fool of himself. But the kid does it really very beautifully.

+ves:

• The little guy’s acting.
• Aamir’s acting.
• Aamir keeps himself offscreen wherever not necessary.
• The little guy’s acting.
• Other actors too chip in well.
• Just the right use of animation in the movie.
• The little guy’s acting.
• The song ‘Maa’.
• Well thought about characters. No villains here! (Is this actually Bollywood??)
• Err.. The little gu…… (Heck! I’ve already become a fan of this guy)

-ves:

• Rest of the songs are crap!

AngadSodhi Dot Com Rating: 9/10

Conclusion: A movie worth watching. It can probably win us the Oscar! But my foresight tells me that we’ll submit OSO. Why? Because it has SRK in it!! TZP is now taxfree! Do check it out in a theatre. If you find your eyes getting moist, “Ya Bindhaas”, as Ishu cutely puts it. Don’t hesitate. The entire theatre would be having tears streaming down their cheeks in a while!!